How Can I Successfully Hack My Home Network?

This morning I was looking at our company’s e-mail gateway and cleaning some of the quarantined messages when I got reminded that while my company’s digital infrastructure may be well protected with firewalls and e-mail gateways, my home network can be wide open and vulnerable to attacks. Like everyone else, I try not to spend too much time configuring my home network and rely on my “ISP to take care of it.” Well, this is a silly approach because the ISPs don’t care about our cybersecurity. It took me hours on the phone, two bricked routers and a house visit (for which I paid of course) to convince mine to replace their outdated router with a simpler gateway device so that I can use my own Eero as the main router and Wi-Fi access point. However, replacing an old router is not something that will solve my cybersecurity issues. Hence, I decided to stop procrastinating and make the first steps to execute on my idea to do some penetration testing on my home network. You will be able to find all my steps and (successful and failing) attempts in the series of Hack My Home post, so let’s get started.

The first thing I need to start with is to decide what my goals are. The best way to do that is to put myself in the hacker’s shoes. If I am a black-hat hacker who wants to attack an Ordinary Joe, what would I like to get from him? Here are a few things that come to mind:

  • Like many of you, I have a file server or NAS device at home, where my family stores a lot of information. Pictures, tax returns, scanned personal documents and what else. Having access to this information may turn beneficial. Hacker’s goal #1: Get access to the file share!
  • Having access to personal information may be useful, but if I am looking for fast money or a way to do bigger damage, harvesting credentials may turn out better. There is a good chance I can find some passwords in a text file on the file share, but because I don’t save mine in plain text, I need to look for other options. Hacker’s goal #2: Steal a password of a family member!

Here is the moment for a disclaimer. Because this is my home, I believe, I have full authority to hack into my devices. If I discover device vulnerability, I will follow the responsible disclosure practice and will need to delay any posts that describe the approach of breaking into the device. Regarding the second goal, stealing a password, I have full (verbal) consent from my family to do that. I also have full access to almost all of their passwords, so I don’t consider this an issue. However, if you are planning to follow my steps, please make sure that you get consent from your family – they may not be so receptive to the idea.

Next, are some assumptions. The biggest one is to assume no knowledge of my home network. Initially, I thought I should start with a diagram of my network, but this will assume I know the details. What I need to do is to get to the details from the outside using public information. If you think about it, the information that hackers can easily (and legally) obtain is the following:

  • Domain name
  • IP address
  • Email address
  • Home address
  • Phone number
  • Social media profiles

This is an excellent set of starting points, isn’t it? Some of those things may be easier obtained than others. Hence, I will need to do some research online to figure out everything I need. I will walk through each step in separate posts. For now, let’s figure out the ways I can digitally break into my home and define some simple next steps.

If I know the IP address of my router, I may be able to attack my home remotely over the Internet. For this though, I need to figure out the IP address of my router. So, one of my next steps would be to figure out an approach to do that.

If I know the location of my home, I may try to attack my home Wi-Fi network and break through it. That will be a little more complicated approach because it will require for me to be close to my home and to use some specialized devices. There may be other wireless devices in my home that I may be able to get to but those will again require some proximity to the home to exploit.

Of course, for my testing purposes, I would like to explore both approaches, but I will need to start with one of them. Because I think the remote exploit higher chance to happen, I would start from there. As a next step, I would need to figure out the entry point for my home from the open Internet, i.e., I need to figure out my router’s IP address.

In my next post, I will walk you through my thought process, the steps and the tools I can use to obtain my home’s IP address.