Can I see everyone's devices on a network without them seeing mine?

Question

I am an IT Manager at a school. I want to be able to "see" everyone's devices (have them pop up in the Network dropdown menu in Explorer), while at the same time hiding my own from everyone else's.

I need an administrator-enabled computer to be able to see, and connect to all devices on the network, while hiding itself from everyone else. This is because I do not want my computer visible to the students.

The OS I'm using, as well as everyone else, is Windows 8.1 Pro.

Answer 1

I think what you want (discover any connected to the network devices) in the standard windows network neighborhood is impossible since windows explorer designed to listen for specific protocols only.

To discover network devices on your network you may want to try various network scanners such as:

• advanced-ip-scanner - You may specify IP and port ranges for scanning to target particular services you want to discover. (This probably what you want)
• nmap - is probably most advanced penetration test tool and scanner (you need good network background and willing to learn all of its functions)
• fing - working on various platforms(my preference on Android), similar to advanced-ip-scanner

As about ability to connect to any device on the network - it depend what device are you targeting. If it is schools PC and you have full access to them, you can setup Radmin (if school willing to pay for this) or free UltraVNC as a service and disable its icon in configuration, so you would be able to watch any remote screen what is going on there (UltraVNC allow you either take remote control or just watch remote screen without intercepting mouse and keyboard activity) as well do anything on that computer as you can do over RDP. If you want to do invisible for the users background console's task you may use PsExec for this or you can setup cygwin (Unix for Windows) and do much more in background if you setup cygwin's SSH server as a system service.

But if we talking about devices that aren't your or school property then you probably know that it hard to achieve.

Answer 2

In windows 8(.1) you can go to

Control panel -> Networking and sharing Center -> Change advanced sharing settings

There turn off "Network discovery".

The computer will no longer broadcast its presence, but if some one sniffs they will find it. You would want to set up your firewall to block things like ICMP (pinging) so that those poking have a harder time finding it.

Answer 3

Taken literally, what you want doesn't work:

If I was a student at your school, I'd bring my own device, put it between the computer and your LAN, and sniff all traffic. (Or, if you haven't locked down the Windows PC, do it on the PC itself). As soon as your computer tries to connect to my Windows PC behind my device, I'll see the traffic, and I'll know both your MAC address and your IP. And there's nothing you can do about it.

But that won't make your computer insecure, without proper credentials, I won't be able to access your computer in any way. All I know is some computer communicated with mine.

If you just mean "the students shouldn't see my device in the dropdown menu in Internet Explorer" (why? Maybe telling them you are monitoring them will make them behave, whereas hiding that from them probably won't...), then possibly that can be done with some Windows configuration, though I don't know how. If you want to access their stuff, Windows has to know that your machine is there, so you can't hide it from the OS - all you may be able to do is to hide it from the user.