now you don't even have to be hacker around your place. You just have to grab it and you got everything you need. every little kid with a dumb tool can do that.
Lemme guess you keep the door also open when you go shopping.
no not really, unless that kid knew what my SSID is and can crack open the router's firewall to insert his MAC address onto the white-list.
or is knowledgeable in mirroring RF noise and isolating which air-borne frequency is my router's then decoding each packet's info.
you make it sound like a 5year old can crack a router's firewall.
edit: hiding SSID is one way of filtering un-intentional evesdropper out of the equation, using a white-list factors out unknowledgeable people.
so whats left that can snatch your info? hackers obviously, so whats the chances of you having a hacker around your area(less than 100m radius)?
speaking of around the area, i've tried connecting right outside the front door, which is about 20m with a clear path towards the router, nope signal bar less than 1. thats what i get when i set transmit power to 12mw.
You clearly don't know how wifi actually works. It is a
broadcast protocol. That means it broadcasts all traffic everywhere within its range, and said traffic can be picked up by any device within range. Not making the SSID public just means it won't broadcast information about the network in response to any requests it receives (that's how devices usually scan for wireless networks - they broadcast a request, and all networks within range respond) - it still broadcasts all traffic freely.
It's not hard to identify traffic from a given device if you want to (since obviously all traffic contains the sending and receiving addresses, it's immediately obvious what traffic is from a given network). And you can identify if there is a network with hidden SSID in range, by using free software like inSSIDer, or more reliably a dedicated spectrum analysis tool (of which there are many).
Obviously, once you've identified there is a hidden network present, there is almost certainly software out there which can download all traffic passing through it. Not having an IP address assigned on that network (because it's using a whitelist, for example) simply means your computer will ignore it by default, and you can't send any traffic on the network yourself. You can still download anything broadcast by the router (given the right software, of course).
TL;DR: Hiding a network just means random passers by won't see it. Anyone who wants to can. And if, then, you leave it unencrypted, anyone can download everything passing through it (just like unencrypted public wifi in a cafe etc). So you should always use encryption and a password, even if you keep the SSID hidden.
