Help me track down a device

ubern00b · 19 Feb 2022 at 20:22

Help! This is driving me mad. I have a device that has popped up on my network and I don't know what it is. I have paused it's access to my network, hoping to deduce what it is when it stops working but this hasn't helped. All I have to go on is the MAC address which doesn't resolve in any lookup tool I have used. MAC is:

aa:83:e9:40:e6:51

The device name appears as "Name not available" so more great help there lol.

I'm confident it will end up being a smart plug or something silly I have just forgotten I added to the network and never renamed but I can't seem to recall doing anything like that recently.

bremen1874 · 19 Feb 2022 at 23:19

Is it a spoofed MAC from a mobile phone?

ED209 · 20 Feb 2022 at 11:23

Does it have an IP address assigned to it? Could you use that to narrow down what it is?

ubern00b · 20 Feb 2022 at 22:12

bremen1874 said:
Is it a spoofed MAC from a mobile phone?

It could be anything I guess. I really don't think it's malicious but I can't rule anything out.

ED209 said:
Does it have an IP address assigned to it? Could you use that to narrow down what it is?

It does have an IP but what can I do with that to determine what it is?

Armageus · 20 Feb 2022 at 22:35

ubern00b said:
It does have an IP but what can I do with that to determine what it is?

Check for a webpage, SSH, or common windows ports being open?

ubern00b · 21 Feb 2022 at 09:53

Armageus said:
Check for a webpage, SSH, or common windows ports being open?

Portscan showed no open ports so http(s)/ssh/rdp all things like that failed. It's disappeared now so will need to wait for it to come back. Convinced it is something my wife has joined to the network and is taking the **** out of me by not telling me what it is lol.

GGizmo · 21 Feb 2022 at 10:52

What happens if you kick it from your network?

Turn · 21 Feb 2022 at 13:51

If you have multiple AP's you could try seeing which one it's connecting to (using the MAC) and what sort of signal it has to sort of gauge the possible whereabouts of it.

visibleman · 22 Feb 2022 at 12:24

Device heavy wireless network? If not, change password as you'll quickly find out what the device is.

StevieP · 22 Feb 2022 at 13:07

Do you have any smart watches? I had an unknown device on my network and it never occurred to me that it could be a smartwatch because I assumed they were connected solely by Bluetooth!

Turns out because it was an extension of the mobile phone it was connected to, it had its own mac address on the network!

BigT · 22 Feb 2022 at 17:14

The mystery device I once found on my network was my house alarm control unit. I tried the route of banning its MAC address in my router config so as to see what stopped working but I arm it so infrequently thanks to COVID nothing stood out for months until one day we went away and the arming failed. Luckily I remembered I'd banned something and investigated it to reveal it was indeed the offending device. It presented itself very oddly on the network as I recall, no revealing info and didn't respond to any ports or anything guess you want that from an alarm!