Uninitiated noon question below.
A couple of days ago, this haprogram
https://programming.dev/post/41491279
Now, during the phonecall with my ISP, the guy asked, "is your router an ASUS?" to which I answered, "yes and no, because it's sold as a router but I have it in AP mode and my actual router is OpenWrt on a Raspberry Pi." To which he replied "noice!"
How did he know the make of my access point? A few of my own thoughts are:
- he was referring to historical data (I've been a loyal customer of theirs for a looong time...) from a time when I was using the same topology (setup?) but without a VPN on the router, so the hostname of the AP (stored in /etc/hostname on the ASUS OS/firmware ?) was simply displayed on whatever software an ISP uses for troubleshooting through... an ARP? But aren't ARPs limited to a LAN/they cannot resolve beyond a hop? Or perhaps a variant of DNS? How indeed do hostnames transmit? Are they in the IP header by default?
- as in 1 above, but he actively used nmap or some other recog program
- as in 1 above but from a time when I was in fact using the ASUS machine as a router
- my VPN is "leaking" - not likely, because all my traffic either goes through the wireguard interface on OpenWrt/RPi, or it doesn't go anywhere...
If 1, 2 or 3: why do they keep historical data on me? Is it praxis?
Amazing! I had no idea that you can grab the vendor off of the first three octets. I shall try to refrain from - for academic purposes, of course - identifying devices and their vendors around me next time I'm at the coffee shop...
For whatever it’s worth, that’s not a huge privacy violation. Most routers auto-identify devices. Most IP scan tools just identify the device by default too.
If it’s a good enough public/hotspot network, they will have “client isolation” turned on and it’ll keep you from seeing any other devices but the actual network equipment.
I see. Well, now I understand why I see vendor names of connected hosts in my AP's GUI. The vendor name of my robot vacuum, I will never be able to pronounce... (Something Chinese.)
Maclookup.app