Hey everyone! I'm a client engineer and had a weird experience today while troubleshooting our enterprise devices. They suddenly couldn't connect to our in-house WiFi after I unplugged the LAN cable. To my surprise, my work device auto-connected to a hotspot, and I initially thought it was an open network. However, it turns out the hotspot is password protected. I could even see the password after entering UAC on my device, and a colleague confirmed it was correct. How could this happen? Has anyone experienced something similar? By the way, I'm working on a Windows 11 24H2 machine. Would love to hear your thoughts!
3 Answers
It sounds like you might have connected to a WiFi network with the same SSID and password at some point in the past. Sometimes devices remember these credentials and will auto-connect if they find a network with matching details, even if you didn’t manually connect this time. It could be worth checking if any other devices you use have connected to the same hotspot before.
Have you considered if it’s related to certificate-based authentication? If your workplace uses something like that for WiFi, it could impact how devices connect. Did you just start working there? You might not have the full credential history yet.
In our in-house setup, we use eduroam where you authenticate with your username and password or download the CAT tool. I haven’t seen this before in our environment.
Just sharing a thought – many devices are set to automatically connect to hotspots to make it easier to access public networks, like those in businesses or cafes. There’s usually a feature to turn this on and off, but it's often enabled by default. Maybe that’s playing a role here?
That doesn’t make sense for me. My test device was set up just last week and hasn’t connected to any WiFi before this.