No, advanced users do not think less experienced ones are crazy. However, claiming you have been hacked by DHS / govt operatives (then later claiming the hackers must be kids/teenagers) and very vague but paranoid statements about this apparent compromise with no evidence or details is hard to believe. More than that, there is no advice or actionable help that we (the community) can offer in the absence of said details.
If you had really been hacked by the government or very sophisticated groups, it would likely be almost impossible to detect, even for advanced users (even many security experts - look at stuxnet and other state sponsored viruses and see how they evaded many experts for the longest time). If you have a standard virus or malware installed, that would certainly be plausible and could explain some of the odd behavior you say you have been experiencing. But al of that is unrelated to OpenWRT unless you can show that the router itself has been compromised. You havenât shown any evidence except for your router identification of openwrt.lan (and as discussed earlier, this is a default behavior of openWRT and does not indicate any compromises).
So please understand that there are just a lot of fantastical claims in your statements but no solid information for us to use to try to help you.
Here are some basic steps you can take to get back control of your network:
Purchase a router that works flawlessly with OpenWRT, and a USB drive that has a physical write-lock switch.
Go to a friend's house who is not "infected"
From the friend's house, download a runnable Ubuntu image and burn it to the USB drive. Then turn the write-lock switch so it can not be written to.
From the friend's house, download the OpenWRT image for your router that works flawlessly... Install OpenWRT on the router.
Connect to the router from friend's computer and change the hostname, set up the WAN connection to connect to your provider (pppoe passwords or whatnot) and set up a Wifi Network using WPA2-PSK with AES encryption. Choose a pass-phrase by opening a book and selecting some unusual phrase from the book, like in a book near me i open it and see the phrase "number of solute molecules" (it's a book on chemistry).
Take the router back home, plug it into your modem.
Without connecting it to your router, boot your home computer with the Ubuntu drive. Install Ubuntu on your computer using the whole drive, overwriting whatever was there with a new partition table (I believe this is a simple option in the Ubuntu installer).
Now connect the Ubuntu computer with a wire to your new router.
Factory reset all your mobile devices using the special factory reset key combination appropriate for your device.
Connect mobile devices to your new wireless network (not the old one).
Barring a major hack on your mobile devices that survives a factory reset. You will now have your own network under your own control, with whatever "hack" having been pushed to the outside of your new router. At this point you can get your ISP to replace the ISP modem to further reduce your problems. At no point should you ever connect any device other than your new OpenWRT router directly to the ISP device. This is basic security precaution everyone should take.
If you want a Windows machine, purchase a new one, and connect it only to your newly created secure network, then immediately force it to do all updates.
Deploy a pihole on your network and configure your router to intercept and redirect all traffic to the pihole. Then use pihole admin page to block all suspicious connections.
I specifically disabled all automatic updates of apps or opsystems, I donât use any cloud apps for Win, Android, or Apple. That much high connection usage for the entire night canât be explained that easily.
In fact the DHS employee does have a reason to hack and harass me, and I only know who it is because a trail was deliberately left for me to see what was âdamaging informationâ was going to be used against me in a court case lodged by his dear mommy. Such as saving to my documents (so that I would see it) a copy of my trust account in my attorneyâs bank account (does an ordinary citizen have such access?), pictures of me and my BF, copies of my medical records from a Mexican hospital (again, not easy to hack into and left for me to see), a sophisticated and very detailed geolocation map that I think was accidentally left on my phone, a travel document that was also accidental, and many more large and small clues since March when I first knew I had been hacked because the hacker wanted me to know in order to intimidate me. I am not easily intimidated and I donât give up when my observations are dismissed.
I have a cousin who has bipolar disorder, when he's manic he posts stuff just like this. @tmomas or other admin, please close this thread, I believe sufficient information has been given to show anyone else the basics of how to recover from a hacked network.
Thank you VERY much for a real hard solution, at least to the router piece of getting un-hacked. I donât know much about pinholes but I am a fast learner and know how to use Google.
I have filed a complaint by hard copy and a complaint with another agency. I thank you very much for the suggestion. This kind of stuff is an egregious breach of public and private trust. I have a number of devices with a trail of breadcrumbs on them, some of which even I can interpret. I don't think he was very careful because I was supposed to be intimidated. These people don't know me very well. But it is still my word and a few million computer files against a sophisticated computer user.
what a poor excuse for spamming the board with your nonsenses. if you were that stubborn with your "hacked network devices" you'd already cleaned these up and got rid of prodigyweb/telmex/DHS/mexico hacker or whatever you believe it is...
I believe a few of the answers above have actually provided so much information that even a newbie person would understand completely, how to gain control of his/her devices and the network. But still the OP is determined to involve 3rd party authorities to investigate such matters which could have been solved easily otherwise.
The information provided by @dlakelan above is most suited to the situation faced by OP and as described earlier, in order to gain back control of devices, factory resetting is essential. It will ensure that no 3rd party apps get left behind in the phones or PCs. So I request OP to take these considerations and act upon them if she wants to get rid of her hacked network.
BTW...Telmex has no IP range issued to them beginning with 198. If it begins with 192, it is likely a Private IP address, and she is behind another router (whether it's the ISP's or a rogue VPN)...
Not sure about iPhones, but on Android you will want to run a 'root integrity check' in recovery mode after a factory reset. This will make sure there are no extra files or modifications in your root partition. I've seen malware stay on there after factory resets if it is able to get root access or on a rooted phone. An example of which would be the "kingroot" rooting app, which unfortunately a lot of people think it is harmless. Simply, removing this app does not remove all traces. Nor does factory resetting from my experiences. It even goes so far as to replace files like debugger and debugger64 with its own, that are used in conjunction with the old files that are renamed. And that's not even touching the surface on what other ways it modifies and leaves traces in the root file system.
If your root integrity check fails your best bet once you have a safe and secure PC is to download the official stock firmware for your device from a trusted source and reflash it.