Scratching my Head…

[Foxbat]

Here’s a great Law of Unintended Consequences: we were installing a new Wireless Access Point in the office today, which allowed us to relocate the existing AP to a location closer to our Company’s HR offices. To check the signal strength, my new network analyst pulls out his iPhone and brings up a Wi-Fi scanner that shows the SSID, MAC Address, Channel, and received strength of the Wi-Fi networks it can receive. I asked him what App he had that could do that on iOS and he tells me it’s Apple’s Airport Utility. Wha-wa-wa-What???

Turns out you go into the App settings for the Airport App in Settings and at the bottom is a toggle to enable Wi-Fi scanning. Who knew? There is also a caveat that this setting can increase energy use, which makes sense. Anyway, I try it out and sure enough, there are all the SSIDs we should be seeing, and our HR representative can now access the data she needs. A good day’s work.

So, I think, I want to try this at home, as I have always seen some odd Wi-Fi networks in our home, in addition to the Wi-Fi I set up. I fire this up on my iPad and bingo, there are some normal names, like “NETGEAR93”, but also some weird SSIDs like ”kenganinja”, “Starbase4”, “Section9”, to name a few. Here’s the weird thing: the Signal Strength is 0 dBm, not -xx dBm like my home Wi-Fi SSIDs, or even weaker numbers for some other networks. It reminded me of the old thriller, “The call is coming from inside your house!”

Since my Watch and iPhone were within a few feet, I tried putting them in Airplane mode, but I could still detect them. I finally powered down my watch and phone, and what do you know, no more phantom Wi-Fi SSIDs! I expect the Watch was innocent as I had seen weird SSIDs years before. When I powered up the iPhone, the SSIDs came back.

So, I appear to have something bizarre on my iPhone with the latest iOS that is creating bogus Wi-Fi networks, for what purpose I have no idea. Google hasn’t been any help, so I think my next step will be a Genius appointment this weekend.

 

[harshness]

Since my Watch and iPhone were within a few feet, I tried putting them in Airplane mode, but I could still detect them. I finally powered down my watch and phone, and what do you know, no more phantom Wi-Fi SSIDs! I expect the Watch was innocent as I had seen weird SSIDs years before. When I powered up the iPhone, the SSIDs came back.

Perhaps this is a side effect of the ping feature?

 

[Foxbat]

Perhaps this is a side effect of the ping feature?

It would be a bizarre side effect, and I wonder why it hadn’t been reported before. I just took a quick look and these are the two SSIDs that show, plus some that have no visible SSID:

Now, what’s interesting is “Roempagel” might seem like a random made up word, but it the name of a local Remodeling company. I wondered if what I was seeing was some “feature” of my Carrier using my iPhone as a mobile femtocell so other customers could attach to their Wi-Fi if we were in close proximity.

 

[telstar_1]

Maybe it's simply a nearby net that the phone happens to (barely) be able to "see" that the ipad didn't. Then because the phone saw it, it passed the info along to the tablet.

 

[harshness]

I just took a quick look and these are the two SSIDs that show, plus some that have no visible SSID:

Notice that the MAC addresses of the SSID-free devices are all very, very similar (as if they might have nearly sequential serial numbers).

I see also that the Roempagel MAC address is in the middle of the same MAC address sequence. Very spooky indeed.

These MAC addresses aren't assigned to a manufacturer but may be of a "Locally Assigned Address" or "randomized MAC" type so they may be part of some scheme that is used to prevent tracking of mobile devices. Presumably all the devices would need to know about each other in some way to prevent MAC clashes.