The week my home network got completely wrecked and taught me a lesson

So last Tuesday I got home from work and my internet was just dead. I figured it was the usual ISP outage. Then I noticed my smart thermostat said 58 degrees and my security camera was offline. After an hour on hold, the ISP guy said there was no outage. I finally looked at my router logs and saw a massive spike in traffic from some unknown device. Turns out my kid's old laptop got hit with malware and was sending out spam to thousands of addresses. It overwhelmed my whole network for almost a full week before I caught it. Had to factory reset everything and change every password. Now I keep a separate VLAN for guest devices and I run a weekly scan on all connected gadgets. Has anyone else dealt with a home device going rogue like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

perry.jessica1mo ago

Blame the ISP not your own network setup.

aaron8451mo ago

Perry.jessica reminds me of that time my neighbor blamed his fridge for slow internet...