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Turns out my home router had guest network logging off by default
I've been sharing my Wi-Fi with visitors for years, never thinking about it. Last week my neighbor's kid connected and I noticed weird traffic on my network. Checked the router settings and found out guest network logging was disabled right from the factory. Three minutes to flip it on and now I see every device that connects and when. Nobody warned me about this basic step for keeping an eye on things. Anyone else find a hidden security setting that was turned off by default?
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matthewdixon1mo agoTop Commenter
dude same thing happened to me. i had a linksys router for like two years before i even noticed the guest network logs were just off. i only found out because my roommate's friend was somehow leeching bandwidth and i couldn't figure out who it was. turned that setting on and saw three random devices i didn't recognize at all. one of them was connecting at 3am every night for weeks. wild what you miss when the defaults are just set to hide everything.
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skyler_jackson271mo ago
3am leecher? man i can barely remember where i left my router manual.
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kimmurphy1mo ago
Wait hold on, I gotta push back on this a little. Look I get that it's creepy when some rando is leeching your wifi at 3am, but honestly who cares that much? Unless you've got some crazy data cap or you're running a server out of your house, a few extra devices barely touch your bandwidth. Like my neighbor probably had my wifi password for two years before I changed it and I never even noticed a speed difference. People act like their network is some fortress that needs defending but for the average person just scrolling through Instagram at home, a leecher or two doesn't actually matter. Feels like we get all freaked out about security stuff just because we can see it in the logs, not because it's actually hurting anything.
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