Detectives ... "I have a snoop?"

[Psi*]

Randomly my WiFi drops off. Nothing connects; iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows notebook HP printer, cameras, nada. This happened today while I was actively using logmein on the notebook. This is in the same house on the same WiFi. I am in the kitchen 2 floors away from the office accessing the machines in the office. And, everything is cutoff.

In the office all machines are wired to the D-Link router. Before I thought it some f-d up issue with the POS D-Link router. But today, I had the presence of mind to log in to the router via a wired machine. I see that there is 1 WiFi IP internal address connected. I check everything wireless & twice. All are not able to connect to the router so nothing reports that IP address.Yet via the router, I see web sites getting accessed from that internal IP! I only check 1 of those IPs & it is difficult to locate, but needless to say, I am the only person on any computer and it is not me!

I reboot the router and all is well. The typical response to lack of connecting. It always fixes the issue. All my wireless devices connect in a moment. The culprit IP that I could not find earlier is now that of my notebook.

Sooooo, there must be a damn something on that damn thing!! I have MS Essentials on it + spybot. Spybot is currently running total analysis. I should add that my wife who can be uncannily tech savvy can also have a lot of inertial in her mind set ... aka F the warnings show me what I want to search to!!! Sometimes referred to as stubbornness. Of course I have a lot of email correspondence via gmail with people in companies all over the earth. Some companies are incredibly cheap & even tho they piss away time with freeware virus checking ... you know, why bother??? So it could be "me", but I think it is some weird a$$ website that she demanded access to. She is the one with the iPad + iPhone 4s; of course unaffected probably because the iThings totally avoided what ever crap web site that she wanted to get access to. So she decided to use my notebook to do what she could not do on her Apple crap. But that is just me & venting a bit. Ok, a lot!!

Anyway, I am convinced that there is a something on the notebook. it has been awhile since I ran spybot. We will see what it brings up. But I am pretty certain that this issue has existed prior to many spybot runs.

The bottom line ... ideas as to what I can run to really scan the notebook! I am convinced that there is something on the notebook that allows someone somewhere to take it over. In the middle of my night it would be completely unnoticed or chalked up to WiFi interference which I have done in the past. Now that my cell is android with some very useful utilities AND I was sitting in front of the notebook at the moment all was cutoff almost, I think it something a bit more diabolical. The single internal IP that was still connected is the clue which is the notebook.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Malwarebytes - http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

It's a sad truth, but spybot has long past its heyday, barely finds a thing, not to mention rather slow too. Malwarebytes is the new 'in thing' for spyware (even viruses), and quite rightly so. It's cleared out problems that MSE, AVG and Avast have all ignored.

Anyway, give that a run, but honestly, I'm not too sure it will find anything. Maybe you have an unsecure service, be it webhost like apache, or a remote login, neither of which will be picked up by a scan if the services are legit but compromised.

Maybe someone is spoofing a MAC address or something. In any case, make sure you have WPA2+AES encryption on the wireless, anything less than that can be compromised in literally 30 seconds. Change the password too.

 

[Psi*]

Thanks, I'll try that right away.

Curious is that there is *1* WiFI connection as reported by the router.

 

[Psi*]

Malwarebytes found 2 issues on her office machine. CCleaner found loads of stuff which I ran 1st. I did this on all of the systems

So time will tell, unfortunately it hasn't taken very long between WiFi episodes.

 

[Rob Williams]

I have issues with drop-outs also, but it's not wireless related; rather, it's router related. I have a decent NETGEAR in this room that connects all of the PCs and other things in here, but that router connects to some cheap ISP DSL router that's not too easy to replace. At least once a day, the entire net will drop out... frustrating given I am usually in the middle of something.

I too had an issue once where a mystery IP showed up, and it had the name of 'xx.img'. I believe it used to be a family member's laptop, but that's no longer ever on the network, so I don't see it anymore.

Malwarebytes is the program I've been recommending people use also, in place of Ad-Aware, just because an IT professional once recommended to me and I figured that was good enough.

Good luck on solving the issue though, networking-related ones can be so painful.

 

[Psi*]

The only threats found were the 2 on wife's office machine via malwarebytes. This is after a full run with spybot. I did not try adaware.

Since then (knock on wood) there have been no problems with WiFi on the router. I have never heard of a connection as this, but the potential cause and effect have been almost black & white.

Still waiting to see if WiFi drops out but it hasn't for 3 days so far! It was dropping off every couple or so hours.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm curious to know what that malware did to actually kill the connection. It almost seems like it was constantly flooding the network with traffic (not quite as hard to do on wireless as it is on wired) which caused the router to crush under the weight.

What a pain this stuff can be =/