How to put fear of God (law) into Wi-Fi hacking neighbors

One cool thing that I did back in the day was created a separate router off of my normal network. I created a VLAN with the router and had the router plugged into a separate machine.

The separate machine had two NICs, one for the router and the other to my normal network. I made the separate machine act as a gateway for the router. Any and all traffic from the "guest" router would be sent through the gateway machine.

I then tweaked the wifi experience for my "guests":

• I throttled the bandwidth down to dial up speeds. Anyone who used the guest access point would pull their hairs out.
• I did allow JPG/PNG/TIFF/BMP files to download at full speeds. Unfortunately for the end user, I made them all blurry and upside down.
• Certain sites like Facebook, MySpace, random torrent sites (based on key words), and any site flagged as pornography, would automatically redirect them to a Rick Roll Video.

It was more of an educational project to see how I would handle manipulating traffic going through a gateway. Ended up retiring the project since I didn't wan't to upset the neighbors too much.

To directly answer your question about instilling the fear of God into WiFi leechers: Another option, never did this but shouldn't be too hard, is to on any page that the users visit while on your guest network, have a floating div, following their mouse within the browser saying "Jesus is watching you...".

Tutorial

A quick search, I found a tutorial on how to accomplish some of these items. Mess with your neighbors

While stealing bandwidth can cost the bill payer (in high usage fees etc.), I wouldn't expect it to be treated as a serious crime in all places. NOTE in places where the act of breaking in to the network (assuming it's got some security) then you could get a prosecution on that basis, but as securing a conviction could be time consuming and expensive - especially if the access point is either unsecured or only lightly secured, there's no direct action you can really take.

I think that the only thing that would be reasonable for you to do is to talk to your other neighbours individually and privately to explain the problem to them and possibly offer to help them secure their networks too. In fact you should informing them of the problem so that they are aware of the potential issues (possibly higher bills, legal issues if the freeloader downloads something illegal, etc.).

Obviously if you do offer assistance and they accept, this will mean that they'll come back to you with all their IT support questions in the future, but that's really your call.

Here's something similar to what kobaltz described, with more technical details on how do achieve it : http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html (a bit dated).

If you set up WPA encryption and MAC address filtering, I'd say you've done most of what's reasonable. If your router supports WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup), make sure to disable it, as well, due to its glaring security flaws.

I ran into the same situation when at school, but instead of hacking WEP, they guessed my passphrase and changed the ssid of my network (setting it to "changeyourpassword" or something).

If you're still fuming over it, I'd say instead of perpetuating the cycle of ill will, channel that hate into something more constructive. Look into further ways of hardening your network, or perhaps redirect that energy into a constructive project of some sort until you've forgotten about it or have gotten past the incident and don't care about it anymore.

If you are already using WPA2 with MAC address filtering and they still get in then you could consider the following ideas.

Use a REALLY long random password which will take forever to crack and change it frequently.

OR

Although I could never legally reccomend this (lets call this a theory), a way to more than likely permanently "scare them off" would be to capture all of their traffic and note all of their credentials. Then confront them with "non-public information about themselves" off of one of their social media sites, etc. If that's not enough, they could "re-unite with their Ex publically which could stir some things up with the current partner" however this might open you up to legal action against you so again I can not advise it, I would only call it a "theoritical application".

OR

Email them (get their email address(es) by sniffing their traffic) that you are monitoring your network and that you have all LOGS that they are connecting without permission and that you will be suing them for the use of your bandwidth and report them directly to any organizations if they are breaking any laws (illegally downloading movies, music, etc. since your Internet provider will hold YOU responsible for what's done on your network). I would look up small claims court in your state and see what the maximum damages are allowed and file suit. Also if you can get video with audio or even just audio recordings of the neighbor telling you off while admitting guilt that they are digitally tresspassing and stealing you may be able to use that in court depending on your state without getting permission from them to record everything. If you can use the recordings, I don't know a judge who wouldn't rule in your favor regardless of how computarded they might be since the neighbor admitted guilt in a recording.

Good luck.