My laptop is refurbished. I've written about how there are a few ... quirks. Being a technology professional, I felt okay with adopting an older machine, knowing I had the skill to fix moderate issues.
From dying drivers to monitor massacres, I've ID'd, solved, and documented a lot of issues.
The newest one was my Wi-Fi adapter dropping the connection to a specific extender.
While troubleshooting, I was curious about doing recon of WiFi networks and broadcasting devices anyway.
That issue? A power setting. It was so determined to save power, it would disconnect. The extender is also flirting with the older end of 6 years old.
The battery needs to be replaced, but that's new to me. As a Windows laptop, there are a plethora of options to pick. How do you decide which one is safest?
I am suddenly concerned about this despite having 3 unofficial, 15$ Macbook Air chargers from eBay, and no explosions.
But let's move onto the Site Survey - Where can I find the strongest signal in my home?
It's not when I'm closer to the router - I'm certain materials interfere with it, when I use it outside.
Using VisiWave - It even makes noise when it's scanning. They required me to upload a copy of my house's flooring plan. Absolutely not, but there's no restriction on the image I could upload, so I picked a stock image of some clouds.
It picked up some television boxes, even someone's smart device.
I erased that particular one, but kept some of the cool names.
If you can't have fun with your Wi-Fi SSID name, where can you have fun?
When I finished making a vague outline of my home, I stopped the scan. This isn't going to be super accurate, just super interesting.
When you click a dot, it brings up some information on the bottom;
That smart device? Has no security. Not good. Further research (AKA: Looking up the MAC address to see if I can sus out a vendor), shows me the address was anonymized by the network administrator (Or built in security). While it's still unsecured, at least it can stand up to one bit of recon.
Unless you search for smart device manufacturers for that particular product (It specifies the actual device, but I won't say what it is). Simply by knowing my neighbors, I have a good guess as to the brand that might be.
I ran the scan on the other side of our property, near some other houses, and got some new SSIDs....and a second one of ours. The MACs look similar, but you can spoof a MAC Address. I did tinker with VLANs on the system, but that was with another router attached; Why did this 2nd one appear?
Other APs also repeated, but not the extensions.
I see some channels listed as simple numbers ('6') and others with MHz (1/40MHz'). There are a handful of people on Channel 11, but way more on 6.
In short, tools help, and more learning is required. This can be helpful for reconnaissance and finding hidden APs (That broadcast SSIDs) in a building that needs mapping.
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