Refering to changing the SSID to something that does not identify the owner of the access point:
If the SSID is Smith_Family and a neighbor is trying to leach from that AP, the SSID tells him where to aim his directional antenna, and he can strart trying to guess your password using the Smith’s phone number, the name of the newest Smith child, or TowserVonBarksalot, the Smith’s faithful bassett hound. It may also tell him that he needs to hack elsewhere, because it is well known that Billy Smith plays WoW 24/7 and there is little bandwidth left over…So he can hack the AP with SSID: Retired_and_never_home instead.
Similarly, giving the access point the name of a buisness makes it an attractive target, as buisnesses frequently pay for more bandwidth, and the provider may allow them to run a server on the connection, so heavy outgoing traffic won’t attract attention.
If the SSID is WirelessXYZ, none of this information is conveyed.
Trute, true, but I have to side with Kevbo. The more obstacles you put in the way, the harder it is to crack. And some of the easiest schemes to implement may halt an amateur hacker even if not a professional.
if we live in 1985. The world has moved on to Unicode and UTF-8.
As for MAC address filtering: Don’t bother. MAC address spoofing is really really easy and pretty much universal among the people who look for open access points.
Allow me to share Rick’s method for a damn near uncrackable password generation and recall.
First find a song that you know the lyrics to by heart. For this example we will use Happy Birthday.
Take three lines out of the song. In this case:
Use the first letter of each word to create your password. Sub in the number 2 for to, giving you a password of:
Hb2yHb2yHbdR
There you go a alpha numeric case sensitive password.
For a password hint all you have to do is write down your date of birth.
Dictionary attack that, I dare you.
Yes, but MAC filtering is a nice extra layer and will do very well on its own to disallow skaters to use your network in a casual manner. Also, your OWN MACs should be spoofed themselves–if you want to freak out a hacker use the hex A-F to spell out something weird as your MAC. This will either tell them to GTFO because a weirdo hacker runs that network, or else it will make the network a target and the more targeted you are the more likely you can retroengineer how the arsehole is coming at you and shut his shit DOWN. Of course if you aren’t an aggro hacker geek you don’t want that kind of attention, but still you should have your MACs spoofed as a matter of course anyway.
The world has moved on to Unicode and UTF-8.