wifi at home and hacking?

LittleBill wrote:

Naio wrote:

myredracer wrote:
Have been having issues with the networked PCs in our house recently. Started to get a message on one that said someone has been downloading The Simpsons and the latest (not released yet) Spongebob movie from bittorrent.

This message was a scam.

There is nothing wrong with your wifi, and no one is using bittorrent.

Bittorrent is highly secure. If someone WAS using it on your wifi, nobody would be able to tell you the name of the tv shows they downloaded.

I hope you did not respond to the message.

although this is true,

they most certainly could see the name of the torrent file needed to download it, if they were capturing packet flow

Maybe some clarification is in order from the OP. Are you referring to message such as a cease and desist email message with threats of legal action from a Lawyer via your Internet provider, an email asking you to click on a link, or a popup message on the desktop of your computer. The first would indicate a WiFi security issue, the second would indicate a spam email, and the third would indicate some form of malware on one of the computers.

And some clarification about Bittorrent. The transfer of Bittorrent packets technically speaking can be highly secure but usually only when using private trackers. Any torrent for a movie, game, TV show etc. will never have a private tracker if you got it from a public source like PirateBay. There are also still a lot of Bittorrent clients out there that do not even have encryption turned on or only on when an peer has it enabled too. Further even when fully encrypted, Trackers know everything being downloaded and uploaded. They monitor the status of all torrents by collecting info like what IP has what pieces a torrent (peer) and what IP has the full file (seed) and are able to tell your client how many seeds and peers are currently active and which ones you can connect to for which pieces. This is usually how the MPAA and RIAA find out you have downloaded the most recent song or movie. They become a tracker, and as soon as you load the torrent, you load their tracker along with all the "legit" trackers, and then they are able to monitor your torrent session by "tracking" your download/upload status. This also means any peer who is also downloading the file can track the status of any other peer. If this was an official cease and desist letter from a lawyer, you can bet they DO know exactly what, when and where was downloaded.