Current geopolitical events have most people and businesses concerned, as evidenced by political protests, stock market performances, and questions raised around new government restrictions for businesses. While the simple fact is that most individuals can’t do much about the conflict, North American businesses can, and should, immediately put into action self-protection mechanisms. Even though the physical fighting may be located in Eastern Europe, cyber warfare is a global event. Businesses need to take heed now and immediately do what they can to protect themselves.
it is quite common to have several physical access points support the same SSID. Every vendor has its own way of handling handoffs and in most cases, it works pretty well. But what do you do when you suspect one access point is causing an issue?
I don’t care which operating system you are using; it is very difficult to select one physical access point to connect to. I should know, I tried for hours with Android and several Windows applications with no luck.
Thought I would try out this nirsoft.net “who is connected utility” from www.nirsoft.net. I am a big fan of nirsoft because their utilities are specific, small, portable, no ads and support is responsive.
From the readme file
“WhoIsConnectedSniffer (https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/who_is_connected_sniffer.html) is a network discovery tool that listens to network packets on your network adapter using a capture driver (WinpCap or MS network monitor) and accumulates a list of computer and devices currently connected to your network. WhoIsConnectedSniffer uses various protocols to detect the computers connected to your network, including ARP, UDP, DHCP, mDNS, and BROWSER.
For every detected computer or device, the following information is displayed: (Some of the fields might be empty if the information cannot be found inside the packets) IP Address, MAC Address, name of the device/computer, description, Operating System, Network Adapter Company, IPv6 Address.
After collecting the connected computers/devices information, you can easily export the list to tab-delimited/comma-delimited/xml/html file.”
I wanted to see if the software truly listens or if it queries devices to determine more information. So I configured Wireshark with an IP address of a random device – a wireless router acting as an access point and was surprised to see that it send out a Browser Announcement and SMB Domain Enumeration. Why would it do this when I have no storage installed and no protocols configured?
In the aftermath of a plane crash, one of the first things the accident investigators look for is the flight recorder. Inaptly named the “black box”, it is neither a box, nor is it black – a very bright shade of red is much easier to locate. Recording on a virtual continuous loop, it presumably will have a record of events for the last critical moments of the flight.
