Disable Windows 10 Wi-Fi Sense sharing feature

Windows 10 has a new feature called WiFi Sense that has stirred up a bit of a storm on the internet, as it shares your WiFi connection details with all your Facebook friends, Skype contacts and other social media friends, even your outlook contacts. Now, just because you may ‘friend’ someone on Facebook doesn’t mean you trust them.. and there is no way of selectively choosing which contacts you can share with, its an all or nothing scenario

The biggest threat of sharing your Wi-Fi access with everyone is you are allowing hackers to position themselves between you and the connection point (the internet for example) where they can mount a Man-in-the-Middle attack.

In such attacks, the hacker can access every piece of information you’re sending out on the Internet, including important emails, browsing, account passwords or credit card information.

An attacker can also target your machine directly using Metasploit or any other number of hacking tools widely available.

Windows 10 Wi-Fi Sense is probably not the most secure feature, but it is not that bad either – if in the future, Microsoft could allow users to choose which individual contacts from a group they could share with, it would be a whole lot better.

By default, Windows 10 will attempt to share any wi-fi passwords you have with your friends, and if they connect to your router, it will try and share it from their computer to their friends. Today I am going to walk through the process of disabling this feature..

First, click the start button and type settings:

Click the settings app at the top of the list to open PC Settings

Select Network and Internet from this screen

Now select ‘Manage WiFi Settings’

De select the tick boxes as shown below:

Then turn off sharing altogether:

Now this only gets you so far, this has prevented you from sharing your passwords with anyone else, but how do you stop Windows 10 on a friends laptop from giving away the password to your SSID?

To do this, you’ll have to rename your network’s SSID so that it ends with “_optout.” So, if your SSID’s name right now is “HackMeNow,” you’ll have to rename it to “HackMeNow_optout.”

This will prevent your friend’s Windows 10 devices from storing and sharing the password.

Sadly, at the time of writing there appears to be no group policy setting to disable this feature and yes, it is enabled on the Enterprise version of Windows 10.

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