Preventing illegal use of wifi

[Kerry-Phil0]

Apart from explicitly stating it in the house rules, does anyone have any suggestions to prevent guests using the WiFi for illegal purposes such as downloading movies or worse, accessing child pornography or something?

I'm really concerned that providing unlimited wifi will cause my husband and I some issues but at the same time understand how useful it is for guests to have free Internet access

[Nicci-and-David0]

@Shania0 this just happened to me. same copyright infringement notice from my provider.  May I ask you what you have done to protect yourself from this happening again?  Thanks for your time, Nicci

[Austine0]

I might be wrong, but you can block some of these in your router settings.

And also it's a good idea to have guest wifi and your own personal one, again, it can be found in the settings.

I've only had a problem with this once in two years

[Pam116]

I too have received a copyright infringement notice from my internet for illegal use by a guest.  It can bring a $30,000 to $150,000 fine so I will definitely be making any changes or restrictions that I need to make to protect myself.  I also reached out to Airbnb to see what I can do to contact the guest and/or block them.

[Shelley137]

Hello Pam, 

I just got the copyright infringement notice and was wondering what you found out from Airbnb. The guests I had seemed very sweet, but they need to know that their behavior is unacceptable. I already left a great review as I didn't get the notification until weeks after. Does Airbnb care?

[Brian686]

@Shelley137 I doubt AirBnb will care and they will simply turn it around onto you as the host. I have l blocked guests from downloading content based through the modem settings and also have an agreement that they ‘agree’ to by their use of the wifi. I have a legal background so have this quite tightly worded and indicate that any action for infringing copyright will land in their inbox if we receive one of these. I have also worded it that if the service is used for unlawful purposes the guest will face the consequences at law and their use of the service is acceptance of there legal liability for any infringements. Knowing they won’t bother reading the agreement, I have a clause that if they use the service it is acceptance of the terms of use. 

I can link a guest with the date and time of use - it is then there responsibility to deal with the issue if it wasn’t them per we but one of their party. 

[Megan184]

Would you be willing to provide a sample of the wifi agreement you provide to your guests?  

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[Jolanta28]

Hello Brian

Do you mind sharing that wifi agreemnet?

[Helen350]

I never considered this issue..... Now I'm worried!  I'm curious as to why I should be liable for someone elses actions? My guest's use THEIR devices, not mine.... So if they do something illegal on THEIR devices, why would I be responsible, just because I own the router & pay the bill? (I've just installed top of the range wifi in my own house with 3 airbnb rooms,AND the same powerful router also serves my 2 tenants in my rental unit next door. British Telecom, my provider know it's serving 2 houses! They never warned me this was a possible pitfall!)

[Jeff89]

You need to install a firewall or implement web filtering or parental control on the router or via an external (cloud) service. You might need to read the  current  router user guide to identify the router's capabilities.

[Mas3841]

What we really want to do is prevent file sharing activities (eg - Bittorrent) that can result in those extortion letters from lawyers. 

I bought a router (Asus RT-AC58U) specifically for guests. So the router is connected to my home router, but has a different WIFI network. That means that Internet still goes through my home internet connection.

My first attempt was to permanently have the guest router connected to a VPN service. However, the problem is that Netflix blocks customers who are connecting through VPN, so I had to turn it off. Blocking Netflix would only encourage illegal activity.

My second attempt, which I think works well, is to restrict outgoing ports to very specific handful of ports. Bittorrent uses the higher port ranges for file sharing, so blocking those outgoing connections will prevent bittorrent. This isn't 100% bullet proof because bittorrent can run over any port. But any guest trying to use bittorrent would quickly realize that it's not working and would give up.

So in my router settings, I created a whitelist of ports that are allowed to go out. For my router, the settings are found under Firewall > Network Services Filter. Here's what I configured in my router.

Port 21:22 - TCP - FTP/SFTP. Theoretically people can download illegal stuff from FTP/SFTP, but you won't get a letter for this.

Port 25 - TCP - May be needed for sending e-mail (SMTP)

Port 53 - TCP/UDP - Needed for DNS (not sure if TCP is needed)

Port 80 - TCP - Needed for normal web browsing

Port 443 - TCP - Also needed for normal web browsing

Port 3544 - UDP - Needed for some business VPNs.

I'd be interested what other ports might be needed. So far, this seems to work well. 

[Vicky383]

Definitely a must to mention it in the House Rules. It's very hard and I am not sure if there is a bulletproof way to stop the illegal download. You can however legally prevent yourself from getting in trouble by setting up VPN. I've written a blog on how to do it. Let me know if you have questions on how to set it up after reading it.

Set up Guest Networks and VPN for Airbnb

https://whatitsreallyliketo.com/wurstbnb/how-to-set-up-guest-network-and-vpn/

[Lawrence222]

Be careful not to have an open NAS drive share. This happened to me and I had to delete the files and disable the share. Be cautious of guests!