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    Can I get browsing history from my router?

    Discussion in 'Networking and Wireless' started by WhySoSerious, Jul 7, 2009.

  1. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    Can you check your history through your router? My sister is very good with computers, and she has the wireless router in her room.

    Can she see all the websites I've been on? She hinted something about this ages ago but I didn't believe her. But I'm quite worried about her knowing about the websites i've been on. (If you get what i'm talking about guys ;) )


    I have a Thompson Speedtouch wireless router.

    Thanks
     
  2. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    If someone controls the network, they can view all of the traffic on the network.

    As long as your sister controls the wireless, she controls you.

    You are going to look so damned pretty with her underwear on your head (heheh).
     
  3. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    How would she be able to do this though?
    step by step, please

    Is there any way to block her?


    My router is ST585v6
     
  4. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    Depending on the router, it may be as simple as activating IP logging in the software, or it may require her to use some third-party software, but as long as she's the admin on the router, it's extremely easy to log websites.

    As far as stopping her, you can always redirect through a proxy, but if I saw someone doing that on my logs, that's gonna be a quick MAC ban. Or at least that's what I would do if I cared enough to log what someone else was doing on my router.
     
  5. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Does she also have the outgoing internet connection in her room?
     
  6. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    She has a phone wire plug in her room. And that wire goes to the modem. And the power cable too.
    She has a PC and uses the ethernet cable.
    I do know the password for my router though.


    There must be some way for her to stop from being able to do this! Someone, please.
     
  7. Pitabred

    Pitabred Linux geek con rat flail!

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    The only way to really stop it is to use an SSL proxy outside the house. Not very easy to get or get set up ;)

    You have only a few choices: stop surfing those sites, or figure out some way to come to a truce with her. As long as she knows more about the network and computers than you do, she is the one in control. Period, end of story. Knowledge is power ;)
     
  8. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    Read and believe:

    When someone owns the network routers/admin, they own the users and their network traffic.

    You are a user. Your sister is the owner.
     
  9. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    But I know the admin password too and when I type my IP in my browser and then click 'router event logs', It just comes up with a list of IP's and times and weather it was a 'sucess' or not.
    It doesn't say the websites.
     
  10. ikethegreat

    ikethegreat Notebook Consultant

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    If you know the password to get into your router, why not just get into it and change the login and password so that she can't get into the router herself anymore?
     
  11. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    Because then, she won't be able to connect to the internet on her laptop, which will then make her know that I have changed it and she will just reset it.

    What software could she use though? Because if on 'event logs' it doesn't display the websites and just the IP address. how will she find out the websites?
     
  12. kegobeer

    kegobeer 1 hr late but moving fast

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    Look at the log - see those IP addresses? Copy one and paste it into your browser's address bar. Viola - the IP is resolved and you are taken to the website.

    To the person who suggested changing the password: whoever has physical access to the router and easily reset the password to default. Changing the password will merely annoy his sister and end up in loss of wifi connection for him.
     
  13. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Too true, too true. Not only that, but your sister owns you, too.

    About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that you'd have to find some sort of an anonymizing proxy server on the internet that you could contract for service with, and which would allow you to create an encrypted "tunnel" virtual network between your computer and the proxy server. More specifically, this hypothetical proxy service would have to allow you to send the target addresses you want to hit inside the encrypted contents of an http message, which the proxy server would then unencode at its end, would then obtain the target documents/resources you wanted to fetch, encode those documents/resources, and send them back to you inside another http message. If you could find an anonymizing service that could do that reliably, then all your sister would see (without cracking your encryption) would be a series of http messages going to the same IP (the IP of the anonymizing server) and containing garbled contents that don't make any sense. Of course, if your sister knows what she's doing, she'll follow the IP back to its source, figure out what service it's providing, and then start working on how to crack the encrypted http messages you're sending out (that's all she'd need to crack, and it wouldn't be too difficult because she'd already know conceptually what those outgoing messages contained - an http-formatted URL to an internet resource).

    That being said, I have no idea if my hypothetical anonymizing service is actually available anywhere, although I suspect it probably is.
     
  14. WhySoSerious

    WhySoSerious Notebook Consultant

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    It only shows 2 IP's and one is mine and the other one doesn't work when I enter it in my browser.

    It just says things like this:

    [​IMG]

    And Shyster1, that looks a little too complicated, lol.
     
  15. Nebelwand

    Nebelwand Notebook Consultant

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    The router might have more information pages than shown in the standard UI (e.g. reachable by URL only), it might offer Telnet/SSH access to its internals, if it runs Linux like some of the Linksys devices she could be running her own/third party apps on it that could be doing pretty much anything without showing up in the UI, if she has the passwords she could also simply sniff your wireless traffic...

    Only way around it is signing up with a VPN service provider and accessing the net through that only.
     
  16. makaveli72

    makaveli72 Eat.My.Shorts

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    Damn...then I guess the OP is being Owned!

    sorry couldn't resist..... :D
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 8, 2015
  17. gerryf19

    gerryf19 I am the walrus

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    I think he's being owned all right, but owned by all of you jokers! ;)

    The Good News
    WhySoSerious, you're looking at the event log for your router--not a website logging function. It records sync information with the DSL provider head office and client access for the local network--it doesn't record your web traffic.

    Also, that device is a DSL Modem/router...it doesn't take third party software that would allow your sister to record your web traffic. There is also not an interface to allow for packet sniffing unless she's installed a piece of software on your laptop.

    She could be grabbing packets out of the air, but I assume your network is encrypted, which makes it much more difficult (albeit not impossible) to do.

    While it's true that when someone owns the network they own the users, just how sophisticated is your sister? Does she have an inkling of networking beyond the ability to turn off the router and push a few buttons in the gui interface? If not, she's a gate, not a gatekeeper.

    Now, the bad news is--as Nebelwand alluded to--this is actually a pretty sophisticated modem/router. There are some more detailed CLI commands that could potentially allow your sister to be more of a gatekeeper than a gate

    How likely is that, though, really? Probably 1 person out of 50 even knows that CLI means command line interface or how to access the CLI (I can tell a few people here might).

    So, how smart is your sister? Is she a network engineer? Or just a regular sister who likes to freak her -addicted brother out?
     
  18. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive - I just don't have much practice :D
     
  19. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

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    or just clear the logs from time to time. or turn them off altogether.

    You're making this much harder than it needs to be. honest, straightworward is easy and usually works. sneaking around is hard and has consequences when you get caught.