I am new to networking so please have mercy on my noob soul…
I hope this question is acceptable for this forum. It just got kicked out of the networkengineering.stackexchange.com forum, so I’m trying to repost it here. Here goes…
I am running a Windows 10 Pro x64 box, and when I run “arp -a” or when I look at my network connections using XArp, I see what I think is an extra entry in my ARP table. I only have one computer hooked up to the current Wi-Fi network that I am using to connect to the internet but in both tools, I see an extra ARP entry with an ip address on my local network that I do not think should be there. Since the XArp entry gives the most info, I will duplicate it here. I see the below entry when I don’t think it should be there:
IP MAC Host Vendor Interface Online Cache
192.168.0.10 00-18-4d-ff-ff-07 192.168.0.10 Netgear Inc. 0x-10 Microsoft unknown yes
First Seen Last Seen How often seen
9/17/2021 14:59:35 9/17/2021 14:59:35 1
In addition, the readout from running the “arp -a” command on my Windows box indicates that the above arp table entry is dynamic.
This entry has only been seen once because I actually deleted the entry with an “arp -d 192.168.0.10” command. It then returned upon a restart of my XArp screen.
I have been worried that someone is messing around with my network and somehow logging onto it and doing who knows what else without my permission.
(I do not recognize the above 00-18-4d-ff-ff-07 MAC address as any MAC address I can find anywhere on my machine. Again, my machine should be the only machine connected to the Wi-Fi network I am using to connect to the internet. And again, this extra ip address seems to be local to this Wi-Fi network that I think should only have my local machine connected to it.
The ip address for my local machine is 192.168.0.14, and its MAC address matches the one that shows in the Properties page for the Wi-Fi network I am connected to on this machine.)
Is this “extra entry” in my ARP table evidence that someone other than myself is logged onto my network?
Or is this entry just something that my Netgear router is doing?
(FWIW, the MAC address for my Netgear router at the ip address 192.168.0.1 is totally different from the MAC address for the 192.168.0.10 ip address shown above, and the MAC address for my router at the 192.168.0.1 ip address matches up well with the MAC address on the sticker/label on my router.)
Thanks in advance for any help with this question.
