Home Hidden wifi ssid
Posted on 02 July 2024. Last updated on 03 July 2024.
Setting up a wireless sound easy but there are some popular miss conception you need to know about.
Hidden wifi ssid
Hidding the name of you wifi network (SSID or service set identifier ) sound like a good idea,
it might make it more difficult to find and connect to your acces point (AP or wifi-router).
But in order to connect to your hidden wifi network, the client (your PC),
need to "shout out" its name. And it will do that each time it "sees" a hidden network.
Because you PC doesn't know if it close to the real one or not.
So a bad actor can listen to these "shout outs", setup an access point with the same name.
And your PC will connect to it. And this is a security risks for your PC.
And hiding the wifi-network name, doesn't make it completely invisible.
Your access point still send outs some beacon frames, periodically.
But perhaps you don't want to whole world knowing your wifi-network and especially it's location.
Well too bad it is probably already out there.
See wigle.net
And Apple and Google have their own wifi-maps, that they use to pin-point a location when GPS is not active on a device.
Google does this when google maps cars are driving around.
Now they say that you can opt-out of this, by adding _nomap to the wifi-name (SSID).
Google, Apple and Wigle say they will respect this.
of course this doesn't prevent others from mapping your wifi-network, but very few companies have so many devices around the world as Google and Apple.
https://support.apple.com/en-asia/102515
