NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Phantom devices showing up
The Attached devices list for my router has been showing A) a Netgear Meural photo frame, yet I've never owned such a device; B) an old computer which is switched off. I don't understand how this ...
Netgear routers include a feature which attempts to determine the manufacturer of network adapters by their Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI) code.
There are numerous tools on the internet which perform this function, such as https://www.wireshark.org/tools/oui-lookup.html
When WiFi devices randomly change their MAC address rather than using the actual hardware MAC address, this feature may wrongly identify a device.
One way to see if this is happening is to go through the list of Attached Devices and see if there are any mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops) which are connected to the network but do not appear on the list of Attached Devices.