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Comment by nyjah | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone here can enlighten me. I usually don't bring my phone into stores. But the other day I went to Home Depot and I had my phone on me. Despite my settings of "Do not connect to any wifi network", I look and I am shocked to find that my phone is connected to some random wifi network. Odd.

I get home and all the sudden my phone won't connect to my wifi and when I try to connect it to my home wifi, it says, "incorrect password" and its connection was intermittent. It would come back for a second if I turned the wifi on and off again.

Eventually I deleted every known wifi network from my phone and its been solid since. But what the heck happened at home depot?

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I had that happen to me once as well - it was an AT&T Wifi network and the auto connection was triggered by something in the carrier settings.

This sounds right. But why would it cause my phone to give me “incorrect password” to only go on and connect later. My wifi password hasn’t changed in 10+years…

Your phone will do this automatically and will not show you you have been connected to a hotspot on the main screen, it will still show you as connected to cellular, this is most likely a carrier hotspot.

https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-pineapple

Best bet is to turn off WiFi/Bluetooth when not needed or off when you leave the house. Decent list below:

https://www.terranovasecurity.com/blog/wi-fi-pineapple-cyber...

>https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-pineapple

That doesn't explain how his phone auto connected to the network despite new connections being blocked, nor does it explain why it broke the saved configuration for his home network

Let’s say he’s a high value target. Put one at a place he goes regularly and 7 more outside his home to be stronger than the home network.

It’s the entry level MiTM. Routers have vulnerabilities that do not get patched. Idk what phone, VPN, or network setup he has.

Apple: Known networks will be joined automatically. If no known networks are available, you will be notified of available networks. Option 2: notified -> asked. Option 3: manually select a network.

Lol, can’t imagine I’d be a “high level target” but I appreciate the compliment..

I should have been notified when asked to join the network at hd, I didn’t consider it a known network. Only wifi network I’ve ever connected to is from home. Don’t trust the rest…

Depending on your home isp - some effectively turn some of their routers into a huge mesh network so that when you’re not home you can have WiFi provided by routers they own practically anywhere. I don’t think it uses homeowner routers but just business routers, though not sure.

Every xfinity home router is set up to do this by default.

Wi-Fi carrier offload via Hotspot 2.0 aka "Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint".

https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/carrier-wifi

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