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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Just In Case I Disappear .. .. ..

Someone hacked into our wireless access on our home network :(

We have a rather generous download allowance of 50 gig per month for peak times and 50 gig for off-peak. I've been checking it regularly over the past few weeks because I knew that with the boys being on school holidays this week & next week we would use a fair chunk of it while they were home.
So last week when I noticed that we only had about 6 gig left I went into our ISP's shop & paid for an extra block of 10gig for our peak times. That was on Wednesday afternoon. I thought cool, that would give us 16 gig until our account resets on the 26th. That should be MORE than enough to cover us.

Oh boy was I WRONG about that! I checked our account on Wednesday night to make sure that the allowance had increased, which it had, but I was almost floored by what I saw. I can check out how much we've used because our ISP lists what we used each day. As I said I was almost floored. Somehow from 10am that morning until about 4pm that afternoon almost 6 gig was used! I don't know how that was possible because there was hardly anyone home during the day. In fact three out of the four of us weren't even home for the most part & Mark was asleep for part of the time and when he was awake he wasn't online.

Anyway, Mark phoned our ISP the next day & queried it. I was hoping it was an error on their end but it wasn't. Mark has now put extra security on the wireless access with a super-duper password that hopefully no one will be able to crack. Since he's done this our downloads have slowed dramatically. I guess that means this 'hacking' has been going on for a while now.

Just so you know, if I disappear before our account resets on Sunday, its because we are on dial-up speeds and I'm having problems waiting for pages to load.

2 comments:

PoetessWug said...

How terrible!!! Grrrr! Is there anyway to find out who was stealing it?! Not very nice people!! Not very nice at all!!

Jo-anne Blossy said...

I don't think there is a way to ever find out but we did learn what program was being used. It was a bit torrent that did it :(

If I stay up between 11pm & 7am I'll be okay as far as bandwidth. Although I would be wrecked the following day lol