Originally Posted by alarmguy
So I turned it back on. With that said for conversation sake by having your SSID off doesn't that make it almost impossible for a neighbor nearby to find your network and hack into it?
And does it prevent the Google Street mapping truck from recording your SSID when it drives down your community block?
Also in my settings I could enter each Mac ID of all my devices and limit access in that manner. Wouldn't that be the most secure way to do things?
No. Anybody with the ability to break into your WiFi is going to know how to use a packet capture utility to:
A. Get the SSID that the devices they are interested in are connected to
B. Get a MAC address of one of those devices that they can hijack
Then, they typically brute-force the passphrase, which is the longest, and most difficult step. Once they have that, they join the network with the MAC of the client that they snagged, bypassing the filter.
The Google point is a red herring. There are myriad SSID's with the same name out there, typically even within the same town and unless you are in the country where the space between the houses is large enough that the SSID associated with a given house is obvious, it doesn't tell you which house has what SSID. I'm unclear as to the perceived value of Google collecting SSID's while they street mapping? These things regularly change (unlike an address) and since you can't map IP's to SSID's, the information is pretty much useless