Part of owning a small IT company, requires me to take some calls that I can’t give to anyone else. One day a call came in over someone’s home wifi network. The two ladies in the house were having inconsistencies in their wifi network, and needed someone to take a look.

As I step into this house, I check my wifi enabled phone to see if I’m seeing a wifi network, and I catch about 8 unprotected ones around the neighborhood. The first thought that comes to mind is that this will be an interesting call.

The ladies explain that one of their computers is getting on the internet and the other is not. I dive right in, by checking the wifi router for an active connection and to get hostnames and SID’s of the network. I notice right away that the router can’t gain internet access via the ISP. I go ahead and call the ISP to find out that the internet was terminated 3 months prior to me coming onsite.

Once we get that squared away, I start wondering why the other PC is gaining internet access. I go check what wifi that PC is using, and as guessed … She is using the neighbor’s internet. After I scolded her, she proceeded to show me that not only has she been using the internet, but she’s also been browsing the neighbor’s shares thanks to Windows picking it up automatically.

Here’s the statement that I always like to leave you with:

“I thought that, that was our computer I was browsing. I guess we better tell them that I’ve been deleting files and folders that I didn’t recognize”