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Here's my situation. In the past several months, I've had my credit card information stolen twice and Instagram account hacked into. I'm hoping this is just bad luck, but I'm a little paranoid now because of how frequent this has occurred in recent months. It got me thinking about my home network setup.

I frequently work from home with a company computer. The computer is connected to my company network via a secure connection using an Aruba network device (which has hardwire and wireless capability). This device is hard wire connected to my personal home router, which in turn is hardwire connected to my personal home modem.

I rarely if ever use my work computer for personal web browsing, online purchases, social media, etc. Obviously, however, I use my personal computer and phone to connect to my personal WiFi network for these things.

With this work/home setup, is it any way possible that someone on the other end of my work network can see my online activity and/or retrieve sensitive information when I'm using my personal devices on my personal network?

work computer --> Aruba --> home router --> home modem
personal devices ------------^
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    From just the details you provided, I'm not sure we can tell. It will all depend on how that Aruba device is set up.
    – schroeder
    Jan 29, 2019 at 23:05
  • This is a common setup, there's nothing special you're saying, try providing more details, if you say something like "My home router has open Wi-Fi" then I can obviously point that that's insecure. But you're missing details.
    – Azteca
    Jan 30, 2019 at 1:57

1 Answer 1

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It is not possible to tell with the information given. The real question becomes how that Aruba device works as Shroeder mentions. My instinct is that no, someone from your work network can not connect to anything on your home network that is not plugged in or logged into that Aruba device.

That said, run some tests:

Log into everything as you tend to use it. Reach out to a friend at work for help with this as you need someone on the work network.

1: Try to ping your friends computer. Can you see it on the corporate network? You can do this by running the command ipconfig on their computer to get the IP address and then typing "ping [ip address]" on your computer at home and seeing if it succeeds.

2: Try the same thing from the other direction. Can your friend ping your computer?

3: Find the IP address of your home computer that is not plugged into the Aruba. Can you ping it? If not, that's a good sign.

4: If you can ping it, can your work friend also ping it?

5:Find the IP of your home router (probably 192.168.0.1) and ping it from your work laptop. Can you reach it?

If you and your friend can't ping your home computer, you should be fine as far as a work "pipe" into your network. You probably have different subnets (work vs. home) and won't be able to route between them anyway unless Aruba is handling that somehow. If somehow your work friend can reach your home router (even if they can't reach anything else) they could probably exploit it and add a route to your network. Definitely make sure you are not using factory defaults on your home router and that "remote access from the internet" is disabled on your home router.

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