How Hijakers hack into your WiFi Network and Stop you from accessing your wireless network

Yesterday evening, after my office I went to my friends room with my sarkaari laptop. I wanted to check mails but couldn't do that because I forgot to pay my data card bill this month and temporarily got disconnected from internet. The idea of checking mails made me more crazy. Left with no choice I just sat in a corner and suffered in silence :(.

After some time my friend got a call from his very special person on earth. He said he will be back in few minutes. Knowing the truth, I replied him with a smile. I felt deserted and this checking mail thing pinched me again. Since I am sitting ideal, this idea of checking mails drove me crazy. Now I wanted to check mails and chat with online friends no mater what. I took my laptop in my hands and checked whether there are any wireless networks around. I checked for the existence of a wireless signal in every corner of the room. When I checked at a wide open window I found one unprotected wireless network, and connected to that network and got free unlimited internet access. Then the techie in me woke up and asked me to explore this free wireless network.

Then from the name of the WiFi network I figured out its manufactures name and searched for default passwords for those routers. I opened the default gateway ip address in my browser (192.168.1.1), I could login to the router as an administrator. Now I can do whole lot of things on this router.

Let me tell you what all things I can do now which I haven't done.

• I can enable logging on the router and know the actual user's web browsing patterns.
  
• I can change the default passwords of the router.
  
• I can enable MAC filtering and make sure that only I can access the router.
  
• I can make the wireless network password protected and deny the owner from accessing his own Wireless network.
  
• I can upgrade the router with some malicious firmware which makes it useless.
  

Now let me tell you what all the owner can do to stop me:

• He could have changed the default password to some strong password that I cannot guess
  * This stops me from getting access to his WiFi network
  
• He could have switched off the router when its not in use
  * This could have reduced the probability of me checking the WiFi network and getting access to it.
  
• Could have Changed the default name of the wireless local area network (SSID) to something else
  * This could have made me try all different default passwords of all the WiFi routers on earth.
  
• Could have stoped broadcasting your network's name
  * I would never notice existence of such a wireless network