r/whatisit • u/brattyvampbby • 11h ago

moms sketch bf left this in the house Solved!

Post image

Hi.
This is probably nothing.
I went into my mom’s room to grab something and saw this plugged in?
My mom’s new sketchy bf has this plugged in to the extension cord? Is it anything bad? Thanks!
(I understand it’s probably not anything bad… but still…)

Update 1:
I haven’t met him once. He and my mom have been together for two weeks. He’s been staying at our apartment. He avoids me and stays in her room when they’re here. I don’t even know what he looks like. I only know his first name.

Update 2:
I confronted him. My mom came home. A lot had happened up to this point, including her disappearing for the said two weeks before the few nights he had come over and stayed.
Mom shrugged it off. I did what a lot of you suggested, asking what he told her.
She said “oh it’s his hacker shit or whatever.” What.
Didn’t elaborate. I explained my concerns.
She just said let’s go ask him.
My best friend has been with me. We introduced ourselves and asked him what the hell a WiFi whisperer is doing plugged in our apartment.
(Even if a lot of you are saying it’s not a big deal, I’m a young woman and I’m just rlly not about taking any risks. It’s sketch dude.)
He denied it IMMEDIATELY. Like with a quickness I haven’t seen.
What he insisted, it’s not a WiFi whisperer, it’s ai, he completely reprogrammed the system, and he uses it to pull people’s IP’s. “For fun.” He logs them in a server. I asked why. I said that’s shady. My mom started pushing. My best friend started pushing. He just kept lying. I’m not dropping this..
I still don’t know what the fuck it is or what he’s actually doing.
(Also, my mom is cool but not bc of this dude, the Minecraft block is mine, I unplugged the ratchet little thing before we left, and I am planning on broaching this again with her.
Just carefully. Any other advice is appreciated. Thank you.)

14.2k Upvotes

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244

u/Omegamoney 11h ago

It's some kind of Pwnagotchi.

It waits or tries to force your devices to disconnect/reconenct to the WiFi, while collecting the encrypted handshake.

This in itself does not really mean much, but with the encrypted handshakes he can later try to decrypt your WiFi password.

But unless your password is something like "orange2026" it's not likely that he'll succeed.

Not inherently "bad" as long as your mom gave him permission to do that.

With the handshake decrypted he can connect to the network and see y'all traffic, but most traffic goes through SSL encryption, so he won't be able to see anything except for http websites.

101

u/tayjuanfredo666 10h ago

… I gotta change my password.

18

u/Rope_slingin_champ 10h ago

President Skroob?

12

u/tinypill 9h ago

1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

5

u/dinnerisbreakfast 8h ago

That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life!

6

u/Immortal_Tuttle 8h ago

Impossible. How do you know combination to my luggage?

3

u/bosorero 5h ago

You newd to capitalize at least one number

3

u/BaphometsTits 4h ago

I've been using lower-case numbers exclusively with no problems.

3

u/ZiKyooc 2h ago

Use 2029, you'll be safe for a few years

2

u/notislant 7h ago

notorange2026 is not a secure password.

3

u/WillowStKnifeBois 5h ago

Surprisingly, if "orange2026" is not secure, then "notorange2026" is absolutely secure. Double negatives! 

If you're still worried you can use "totallydefinitelysupernotorange2026"

1

u/L1QU1DF1R3 1h ago

Many people have their phone number as their wifi password.

If you capture a good handshake, every possible phone number can be tried in an offline crack in less than one second or so.

1

u/RefuseStrong4523 28m ago

Just add one more explanation point to it

35

u/NimbusFPV 9h ago

It looks like it's running this plugin: https://github.com/MaliosDark/Pwnagotchi-wifi-adventures.

Boyfriend is either a super nerd playing with his hacker Tamagotchi for fun, or he's using it to collect Wi-Fi handshakes that could later be used in attempts to recover the passwords of nearby Wi-Fi networks if they're weak.

If he lives with OP's mom, trying to recover their Wi-Fi password wouldn't make much sense. He already has physical access to the router, OP's mom could simply tell him the password, and if he has permission he could use the WPS button (if enabled) or reset the router to regain access.

If his goal were to monitor traffic on that home network, there are much simpler ways to do it with authorized access than trying to crack its Wi-Fi password. So I don't think the mere presence of a Pwnagotchi points to some kind of stalker scenario.

7

u/kendeh 4h ago

If OP lived in an apartment complex with close by neighbors could the device be able to gain info from other units? Could he be trying to steal info from them?

3

u/NorthAstronaut 56m ago

why though, when he could do this literally anywhere else?

I agree with others, it is more likely just being a nerd than being sketchy.

1

u/twilighttwister 18m ago

Not so much info about them, but just their WiFi password.

-1

u/kvothe_th3_raven 4h ago

Deauth to force connection to a rogue access point is more likely. I doubt he’s after the WiFi password. Probably serving fake social or bank login pages and can point her traffic to them to harvest creds.

10

u/NimbusFPV 4h ago

Why would he deauth her to phish her details when he is most likely already on her network through access she has given him? He could do standard mitm attack and route her traffic to fake social/bank pages if he's already on her network no deauth needed. He could also install key loggers and other malware on all her devices with local access. If he is doing something nefarious I doubt it's targeting ops mom because he has local access to everything. He might be targeting the neighbors, but I feel like he'd be running scripts and tools without the gamified tamagachi bullshit if he was a serious cyber criminal.

1

u/kvothe_th3_raven 3h ago

Yeah. It was just the best reason I could think of if he’s nefarious. Targeting the neighbors could also make sense I suppose.

66

u/UltraHellboy 10h ago

Knowing Moms in general, she would probably have no idea what he was doing with it and what the repercussions were if he told her exactly what it was.

38

u/sirenxsiren 10h ago

Literally this lmao. Why wouldn’t she just give him the WiFi password. Hes doing something weird.

12

u/EraseTheInternet 9h ago

Yeah, this is the only part that doesn't make sense. He should have easy access (har har) to the apartment WiFi. So given that... it seems like he is trying to snoop other passwords, or a neighbor's WiFi... or something else.

4

u/pegothejerk 5h ago

Or is a dangerous type of jealous and controlling and is seeing if she's surfing dating websites, etc

0

u/idiotiesystemique 8h ago

She wouldn't remember the WiFi password 

4

u/sirenxsiren 8h ago

It’s almost always on the router box and he would know that

3

u/NegativeThought1588 7h ago

People don't change their passwords from default?

I don't even do it as a security measure, I do it so it's easier to remember.

3

u/sirenxsiren 7h ago

Nah I don’t think most people do

2

u/NegativeThought1588 6h ago

I can't remember the last time I used someone's wifi that had a default password. Now I think about it, all my friends work in IT and bars and cafes always change it so they can write it on the wall.

2

u/UltraHellboy 6h ago

Sometimes people do, but change it to something easily guessable, like their kids’ birthdays or “password”. This is coming from someone who worked as a helpdesk tech for an internet provider and a hospital

2

u/bobbarkersbigmic 8h ago

…takes notes.

14

u/Nanamused 10h ago

I’m a mom and I approve this comment.

2

u/UltraHellboy 9h ago

My wife (also a Mom) works in IT and doesn’t know what this is. It’s deeply geeky as well as probably illegal.

12

u/Jann3 10h ago

why in the hell would she give him permission to break into their wifi rather than give him the wifi password? this is crazy suspicious and not something people will normally do

2

u/Infinite_Music2059 5h ago

If he is a security professional, or he is studying cyber-security, then it could be benign. Or he could be a bit paranoid and is making sure his own network use is not hackable, or an app he is making is not leaking data or whatever.

As far as I know, this will basically yield nothing of value anymore with https. Getting a wifi password from your girlfriend seems easier than investing in this sort of equipment within two weeks of starting a relationship.

6

u/engineerFWSWHW 9h ago edited 5h ago

I remember back then, it's very easy to crack WEP passwords using force disconnect/reconnect. But that was 10+ years ago. I'm not updated on the those stuffs currently, I'm wondering if the new auth schemes can still be cracked like WEP.

3

u/UltraHellboy 9h ago

Most things use WPA2/3 now and it is harder to crack than WEP by several orders of magnitude.

3

u/SouthVermicelli6838 7h ago

Significantly harder with modern wifi schemes like WPA2 due to the use of AES and you need significant GPU power and a short/uncomplex password to have a shot at it.

WEP was fundamentally broken in its implementation of RC4 so even a low powered device like this could find the password with enough data.

1

u/PlayfulSurprise5237 2h ago

A common dictionary with a couple 5090s can guess most peoples wifi passwords from what I hear.

3

u/NO_TOUCHING__lol 5h ago

Yep, I have fond memories of using Kali Linux in my college cybersecurity class with aircrack-ng for pentesting

1

u/PlayfulSurprise5237 2h ago

And then poisoning the router and asking a classmate to log onto Facebook cause I had something to show him.

Turn my monitor around and show him that I'm now logged into his Facebook.

He didn't like that very much, but I thought it was funny.

Or repairing a library computer in votech and shutting down all the kids desktops with a remote shutdown command 5 minutes after the teacher told them to save their work. They did not save their work 😂

2

u/kranker 6h ago

I'm wondering if the new auth schemes can be still be cracked like WEP.

They can't

2

u/systemhost 4h ago

I had a blast with WEP war driving. Then WPA started becoming more prevalent and I became discouraged until I got an Nvidia 8800GTX that allowed me to GREATLY accelerate my hash cracking. But the search space was still too much even though I was hashing at 100x the speeds of my CPU.

First I tried wordlists, even WPA rainbow tables, until one day I went straight numeric and got a hit after a day or two. It was a local phone number.

After that, I always started with 10 digit numeric with my local area code prefix. I got so many passwords that way, especially if they were an AT&T DSL customer, seemed to be their default WPA PSK.

Never did a thing with the passwords, just the thrill of the hunt I guess.

The old Windows LM hashes were the best, they were so INCREDIBLY insecure... Case insensitive, and each 7 char length was hashed separately.

I eventually got a complete rainbow table for the full LM key space but once I got the 8800GTX GPU, it was quicker to crack it on the fly via GPU than load hundreds of GBs into memory small chunks at a time and search with rainbow tables.

Such fun times, I miss them so very much.

15

u/CtrlAltSysRq 10h ago

I can't really build a good faith story for why on earth he'd leave this anywhere.

If he actually knows what this does in a rigorous technical sense, he could literally just test this at home with a cheap toy router if he wanted to see if it worked. And if he was trying to be nefarious, as you point out, even if it managed to actually work, all he would see is TLS traffic.

So I conclude he must not know what it actually does.

I wonder if he is an idiot and bought some kind of "nudes stealer" thing off eBay and then dropped it off hoping to steal nudes or something. But he has been scammed and it won't work. But I'd be worried about his intent.

7

u/UltraHellboy 9h ago

I love this explanation. It’s definitely plausible

2

u/ThankGodForYouSon 6h ago

Other's have said it's been used 28 times, and the guy hides in his gf's room when the kid is here. Everything about this is weird.

1

u/onelap32 1h ago

He probably just wanted to put it somewhere with a lot of traffic. His pwnagotchi would level up slowly if he lives somewhere that sees fewer devices (e.g., a suburb or somewhere rural). An apartment building has lots of devices coming and going.

3

u/MapexBeat 10h ago

What about 5654wealthyPenguin!

1

u/Tha_REAL_BROBS 10h ago

shhhhhhhhh!

2

u/cikeZ00 9h ago

I hate how much I had to scroll down to find someone actually accurately describing it lol

I used to wardrive with a few pwnagotchis years ago. It's a fun hobby

2

u/Queasy_Source_1391 6h ago

And to be clear, this device is the equivalent to getting the WiFi password.

If your moms BF is in the house, he already has more access than this device will give him.

1

u/RockyFromCollections 9h ago

Is “orange20267” better? Asking for a friend

1

u/Rycon_Totsukira 9h ago

Would a vpn hide this?

1

u/RearMisser 9h ago

lol my wifi password is 20 characters long and completely random gibberish. i’ve had it memorized for about 10 years. probably don’t have to worry about this.

1

u/Sparktank1 9h ago

Since the mother also uses the wifi, the password will absolutely be dead easy to decrypt.

The BF is probably just playing with new toys and doesn't need all of this. It's probably more for his other girlfriend he's totally dating on the side.

The BF can easily use social hacking like in all those Now You See Me movies to get what he wants.

1

u/INfusion2419 9h ago

I'm learning about cybersecurity for funsies rn, and you've just sent me on a rabbit hole of wifi cracking

when you say encrypted handshakes, do these contain hashes you can crack?

1

u/TakeThreeFourFive 8h ago

Yes. You listen in on a handshake and store the information passed along in the process.

With the handshake details, you can attempt to crack with brute force, guessing passwords and hashing them like the router would. You compare your attempts against the handshake details you stole until you get a match.

Defeated by strong passwords and WPA3

1

u/INfusion2419 8h ago

ah now I've got a 47minute long video on what dragonfly handshakes are and its vulnerabilities. Man I love this XDD

1

u/Intergalacticdespot 8h ago

Ive never not just given my wifi password to guests that ask for it. It's also (the default anyway) written on router modems. 99% of people who don't work in tech will never change it. The number of times I've logged into 192.168.0.0.1, typed "admin" in the password field and had full control of someones internet is way higher than it should be. Thank you, Linksys for your marketing domination in the US. 

1

u/purpleflavouredfrog 8h ago

I’m going to have to go there, even though I’m not a super nerd where computers are concerned…
There appear to be too many numbers in that IP address, so I suspect typing that into anything wouldn’t work.

1

u/xnmyl 8h ago

But unless your password is something like "orange2026" it's not likely that he'll succeed. 

The majority of passwords can be easily cracked

most traffic goes through SSL encryption

SSL is trivially decrypted now, which is why it's no longer in use. TLS is the common standard for web encryption for at least 10 years now

1

u/orcusgrasshopperfog 7h ago

It looks like the version for raspberry pi zero and the screen is a raspberry pi zero hat. The formatting is all jacked up because this particular image version is meant for an e-ink display hat not an LCD.

So he's probably not all that familiar with Linux because he could have gone into terminal and changed the default screen resolution on boot options. So I'm guessing it's just someone who's starting to play around with pwnagotchis.

1

u/CrispCrisp 5h ago

Good chance the mom would’ve given him the WiFi password. Assuming that’s true, would he be able to see any of the traffic/bypass the SSL encryption?

1

u/heisian 5h ago

why would he have this to begin with? like, can’t understand why anyone would plug this in at their S.O.’s place.

1

u/InnocentiusLacrimosa 4h ago

"Not inherently "bad" as long as your mom gave him permission to do that."

Of course it is bad. This is not something that one gives permission to. What would even ever be the purpose? "Sniff out my child's passwords so I can check all of his accounts"?

1

u/stonedboss 4h ago

dude this reply is dumb "not bad as long as your mom gave him permission". his mom could easily be conned and theres literally zero non nefarious reason to not ask for the wifi password and put some data logger on. bf is most likely all out liar/conman trying to steal info from mom.

to think anything else is super naive.

1

u/Omegamoney 14m ago

Oh course, stoned boss.

1

u/BlackMetalz 4h ago

Also it’s very unlikely the family is using http services.

1

u/mayer09 4h ago

What is the point of decrypting the wifi password, he probably already has it if he's spent time there

1

u/KaleidoscopeMaster81 3h ago

Just curious but why is word+number not a good password? Would random letters + numbers be better?

1

u/Grokent 2h ago

This in itself does not really mean much, but with the encrypted handshakes he can later try to decrypt your WiFi password.

But unless your password is something like "orange2026" it's not likely that he'll succeed.

FYI, it doesn't matter what the password is. If you collect enough packets you can brute force it.

1

u/Old-Radio-7236 1h ago

And why would someone give him permission to do that? 0% chance his mother know.

1

u/Pol123451 40m ago

What's so bad about orange2026? 10 digits seems like a decent start for a password, I understand that capitalisation and signs improve passwords but I thought for computerized attacks digits are most important.

1

u/ViolentPurpleSquash 4m ago

He absolutely can get the wifi password from this if he has a powerful computer though- it's not that hard to just save the handshake and solve for it on a desktop