Plot twist: It was one of mine the whole time.
So there I was — mid-coffee, mid-ticket, mid-existential crisis — when I looked at my Wi-Fi dashboard and saw something terrifying:
Two networks.
Same SSID.
One was mine.
The other? An imposter.
My first thought?
“It’s happening. Evil twin attack. Shut it all down. Tell my wife I love her.”
I leapt into IT emergency mode like a boot loop on fire. Checked MAC addresses, scanned signal strengths, ran rogue detection. The “other” network wasn’t matching my current AP inventory.
I whispered to myself, “Et tu, Ubiquiti?”
Evil twin… or evil déjà vu?
For those not familiar: an evil twin is a rogue Wi-Fi access point that copies your network name to trick users into connecting.
Classic villain move.
Big hacker energy.
Cyber boogeyman stuff.
So seeing a second access point with the exact same SSID as mine triggered every alarm in my caffeine-addled brain.
I stormed around the office with a WiFi scanner like a network exorcist.
The great hunt (feat. me looking like a maniac)
I walked past walls.
Crawled under desks.
Held my laptop in the air like I was trying to catch a rare Pokémon.
Finally narrowed it down to… the storage closet.
A box.
Unplugged cables.
Dust.
Wait… is that…
No way…
I dusted off the label and — yup.
It was a deactivated Ubiquiti AP. From a previous deployment. Still plugged in. Still broadcasting. Still very much mine.
So what happened?
Apparently, during a past office shuffle, I “deactivated” the AP in our controller… but forgot to actually unplug it.
So while it wasn’t routing traffic, it was still yelling out the SSID like an unpaid intern trying to be helpful.
Congratulations, past me. You caused future me to burn 45 minutes, 300 calories, and half a mug of coffee over a phantom threat I created myself.
What I did after recovering from embarrassment
- Unplugged the rogue-but-not-really rogue AP
- Updated the hardware inventory (finally)
- Laughed at myself, then wrote this article
- Left a sticky note on the AP that says: “I caused drama. Sorry.”
Lesson learned:
- Not all evil twins are evil
- Some are just forgotten coworkers quietly doing nothing but causing chaos
- Always verify before you go full hacker-hunter
- And yes — document everything, even that “temporary” AP you swear you’ll come back to (but never do)
TL;DR:
- Thought I had a rogue AP
- It was one of mine
- Still broadcasting after being “deactivated” months ago
- Caused chaos. Fixed it. Blogged it.