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Chat with an IT guy at my dentist's office made me paranoid about my router
He saw my phone's WiFi list and asked if I still had the default admin password on my router. I said yeah probably, and he just shook his head and said "you're basically handing your keys to the neighborhood." Has anyone else actually gone through and locked down their router settings or is that just overkill?
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elizabeth_williams1d ago
I was just reading something the other day about how people's routers get hacked through exactly this, default passwords are like the number one thing they scan for. It's not even about someone targeting you specifically, more like automated bots just sweep through neighborhoods looking for easy access. I finally changed mine after my neighbor's kid somehow got onto my WiFi and kept messing with my printer, that was enough to freak me out. It only took like ten minutes to log into the router settings and swap the password, definitely worth doing if you ask me.
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mason_jackson23h ago
Three million bot scans happen every single day across the country and 99.9% of them just bounce off if your firewall is even half decent. I've left my router on the default password for six years @elizabeth_williams and the only thing that ever happened was my own kid accidentally factory reset it. Isn't getting spooked by a kid printing memes a little overkill for something that takes an afternoon to fix if it ever actually breaks?
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