Neighbors maybe Jamming our WiFi signal! Need help proving it.

Wifi signal jammer should not use for illegal purpose. If he keep on doing that, you can warn him. Or you can also buy a wifi signal jammer to block his wifi signals.

Things like phone jammer wifi blockerr can actually be beneficial. However, it is such as pity that there are some people out there use it with malicious or illegal intention, which make the product known as misuse.

What's the Make & Model and firmware version of the router? How many are clients are connected through WiFi?

Here's a few things you should know about wireless routers (If you don't know already)

WiFi channels

They work using a channel range much like the radio on your car. Have you ever started driving somewhere and two radio stations seem to mesh together? This is what happens when the station's frequency range mixes with another that's in range.

To keep it simple, your G/N router uses channels 1 - 11. Again I'm keeping it simple and not getting into the advanced settings for explanation. If you're on Channel 1, and your neighbor is on Channel 1, there will be interference and it'll become problematic as packets will start to drop and your net will become slow or in some case unusable.

You can go into your router, usually the URL is 192.168.1.1 as the default route, and log into your router, change the channel and see what happens. The better channels are 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12. Do note that if you pick Channel 2 for example, you'll be using up some space on channel 1 and channel 3. Google/Youtube can be very helpful at explaining this better than I and the more advanced settings and how to narrow it down for maximum efficiency.

SSID Broadcast

Every router comes with an SSID Broadcast, which is what you see when you connect to your internet. "Connected to LinksysE3000" or whatever you named yours. You'll see this when you click on the wifi button on whatever you're using to connect to the internet. It'll display various wifi hotspots around.

You can disable the SSID Broadcast (usually in the wireless settings of the router) and your wifi signal won't come up in the connection list. Anyone that wants to connect to your router will have to know the SSID and to do that you'll need to use wireshark or something.

IMPORTANT: If you do disable the SSID Broadcast, you will need to KNOW exactly what it is, otherwise you won't be able to sign onto the internet.

Determining if it's a Jammer

You can determine this by getting a wifi application that monitors the wifi signals using your wireless card. You can download one of those applications for PC or get it for Android/iPhone. If all channels suddenly drop, that means they are most probably using a Jammer or the sun just shot a solar flare at your house. Logging this is important if you want to use legal action since Jammers are illegal.

REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD ON YOUR ROUTER'S LOGIN! If it's still linksys / admin, then you have to change that.

If I was you I would run CAT6 or powerline networking tomorrow to get your parents business back up. Document costs. The next day setup a honeypot network and catch those mofos. If they are jamming they might be attempting to hack also. I trust the instincts of the OP given his background. You need a wireless spectrum analyzer and a directional antenna to figure out where the attack is coming from. Get as much evidence and hire a lawyer.

Have you tried to set the wifi SID to not broadcast. They might not be sophisticated enough to go farther than straight wifi jamming.

A jammer like one you linked to in one of your replies would jam your computer from receiving any kind of wifi signal.. even if said signal was originating outside of the jamming zone. So all your devices would say "no network found" or similar.

In cases like this, where you can still detect network but not necessarily connect or receive good packets is to boot up a specialized network analysing OS such as backtrack, which (after disconnecting all your devices from your wif) can tell you if your network is receiving bad packets originating for elsewhere such as your neighbour.

That said, most likely culprit is a defective router, old or new, routers can easily become defective.

To troubleshoot, I think you need to turn off every appliance in your house including your mobile phones and such, except for your router and modem device. This way, you can know whether there are any inferences from your appliances. If not, it must be outside. Check whether you are near any high voltage source.

Try to reset your router to factory default setting. To do this, locate a tiny hole at the back or at the bottom of your router. Use a pin to reset it. You might have tinkered with the values that have caused a conflict in the configuration.

Hope this helps.

I was thinking about this problem.

Years ago I was into Ham Radio. Nothing big or fancy just a little DX-ing. It occurred to me that it should be possible to detect if you are being jammed using a frequency counter that covers the frequencies you need. All you would have to do is to start it up and keep it running close to your router. When the drop out happens turn the router off. If you attach a mini dish antenna (easily made) it would be easy to track the direction of the strongest frequency.

It also occurred to me that it may be possible to prevent attacks using a home built Faraday cage. If you make a box of mesh and leave one side only open you will only get signals from that side.

Just some thoughts.

I have had 2 Drones fly away recently when flying over the exact same general area in my neighborhood. I just ordered #3 @$1,000.00 a clip. How can I determine if I have a disgruntled neighbor (I have been buzzing the neighborhood for about a year) but with no issues I know of. A private pilot and "gadget guy with money" lives rght around where I keep losing contact with the bird. Thanks!

1. Run any of the WIFI analysis tools you can install on a cell phone.
2. Run a dedicated WiFi analysis tool AirMagnet or some other tool dedicated just to 802.11 spectrum analysis.
3. Change your clients to use the 5 Ghz spectrum as their is less interference there.
4. Ask neighbors if they are having similar issues.

Wireshark is not something you just install and figure out how to use especially when it comes to 802.11 but this will help you out... wiki.wireshark.org...

99% of the time computer and network , be it ethernet or 802.11, problems can be explained as something not related to Spy Vs Spy.

originally posted by: Em2013

SSID Broadcast

You can disable the SSID Broadcast (usually in the wireless settings of the router) and your wifi signal won't come up in the connection list. Anyone that wants to connect to your router will have to know the SSID and to do that you'll need to use wireshark or something.

This is sort of an antiquated way of thinking when it comes to 802.11 security and even moreso if you are dealing with someone that understands how to block or jam 802.11.

www.howtogeek.com...
www.pcworld.com...

originally posted by: jrod
To make a long story short, my parents and their neighbors have an on going fued(as childish as it is, we do live in Florida). Among having security cameras pointed at my parents house we suspect they are jamming my parents wifi network. At first I was sceptical to their claims but having been through about 10 wifi outages in the past 24 hours I too am beginning to suspect something foul is going, the latest alleged jam corresponded with said neighbor coming home for her lunch break and all the alleged jams occur when they are home and. Various law enforcement agencies have been contacted as well as the FCC, however being a petty crime they don't seem to care. I need some insight on how to prove the said neighbors are maliciously jamming my parents network and what appropriate actions they should take.

My advice to them is to give up using wifi and use landlines on all their computers(both parents work out of their home), routing cat 5 cables through the house is a bit of a headache and my brother and I would be doing the work, needless to say as of right now my parents are still using wifi. They have tried switching channels, changing passcodes, ect.; however if the said neighbors do have a jamming device not much can be done to prevent the network from going down.

Any advice both legal and technical will be of great help to me and my family.

Hello Jrod

It sound as though there may be someone running whats know as a De-auth attack against the router in question.
In most cases the individual will use a program know as MDK3 or another know as REEVER to accomplish this.
These are both natively ran on the Linux/Unix Platform and are widely available.

If you have a Linux system on hand you can easily get the software needed to start to learn how to detect whats going on via the Wifi space

The best recon tool that is free is know as “Kismet”. This is a very powerful tool and is available for free here www.kismetwireless.net...

To get this to run on a Windows system is possible but much more involved, though I wouldn't tell you not to try because anything worth doing is never easy.

Running Kismet on a Linux system is simple. Use Ubuntu or Linux Mint to achieve this with ease.

On Linux open up a terminal and enter this command

sudo apt-get install kismet
(Enter)
and this will que the repository for the program and install it.

once installed simply type in the terminal window
sudo kismet -i wlan0
OR
sudo kismet
sudo means “Super User Do” just FYI

For windows installation follow these instructions from this site
www.renderlab.net...

This is the best approach to getting the evidence you need

youtube example
www.youtube.com...
3min in shows you how to start the process

Hey Jarod... I had a similar issue with my wireless network. My neighbour was hacking the WPS password then connecting to my network and using so much bandwidth it brought my network almost to a halt. Solved the problem by buying a router without wireless and a business level wireless access point without wps. I then turned the gain down to minimum and placed the access point at the other end of the house to the neighbour. No problems since...you may want to search the vulnerabilities of wps networks as the encryption is not as strong and does not reject continual password attempts. Apparently older routers with wps can be hacked in as little as an hour and a half where wpa2 may take several weeks or montgs depeding on wireless betwork traffic! hope this info helps! a reply to: jrod

You might consider a MIMO router, one that separates connections on different channels. Netgear makes a few excellent ones and the Netgear administrator program has all sorts of debugging capabilities to see if attacks are directed to your main IP. You can also limit connections to your WIFI network by only allowing connections from known MAC addresses. These are the unique firmware addresses that all network devices use in the lower levels of routing. You can initially give the system only the MAC address of your computer system NIC card or WIFI card, to see if you still get interference.

You could build a grid of magnetron guns and point them at your neighbors house while they are asleep. After they are taken to the emergency room see if the problems persists. Unless of course the issue is they have been pointing one at you. jk.

1. Take the wireless router some place else and see if problems persist. Eliminate your own equipment.
2. Put a mac address filter on the device, turn off the broadcast of the ssid, change the ssid and password and channel to something very different, and see what happens then.
3. Get a directional antenna such as a yagi antena, turn off your wireless router and wireless devices such as laptops, phones, and tablets, and cordless phones. Walk around the outside of the house with the antenna pointed outward measuring signal db levels with wireless and see what comes up. Make a few passes for consistencies sake.

Most of the problems I have seen come from interference on the same channel and you need at least two channel separation to minimize interference. One of the jobs I did was installing wireless into hotels. You had to be careful about overlap in frequencies because as somebody said you can have the radio station effect where two similar strength frequencies compete. I also had to occasionally take into consideration other hotels nearby and reflective materials such as sheet metal in concrete floors.

Lots of fun can be had with very directional antennas. If you sweep the antenna while watching db levels on one of the programs mentioned by others you will see a spike when you sweep the AP. Me and uhhhh friends also used powerful directional antennas when wardriving to triangulate things like industrial park AP's. Just kidding,, or am I. Then there was that time we broke the popo's wireless and mapped to their unprotected HP printers and printed out 10,000 pages of "you have been hacked" on each printer. Just kidding about that,, or am I. Nah, just kidding. No need to bug me, the dee oh dee already has that covered. Then there was the time we telnet'd through a poorly protected Cisco router into an AS400, which was also poorly protected. Oh, sorry, wrong subject.

Ubiquity makes some pretty powerful access points that mount to the ceiling and fire downward. They won't break the budget either. Shield the neighbor side of it and this may work well. Use the strongest password possible, maintain mac address filters, regularly change the password, turn off ssid broadcast and occasionally change the channel. Good way to do passwords is common words or names in mnemonic. Say, something like Richard Dawson as R1cH@Dd@w50n!. Easy to remember, hard to crack. Use the strongest encryption you can. Etc, etc..

Change the channel your Wi-Fi is using.. you might be surprised how much that helps. A Wi-Fi app will show you how congested the default channels are that people never know how to change.. so everyone is overlapping each others signals.