Should i turn ssid off

Encrypting—essentially scrambling—the data traveling over your network is powerful way to prevent eavesdroppers from accessing data in a meaningful form. Several types of encryption have emerged over the years.

But today WEP encryption can be cracked in a matter of minutes. WPA2 has been around for nearly 10 years. If your equipment is old enough to be limited to WPA security, you should consider an upgrade. WPA Personal is designed for home use and is easy to set up.

You simply establish a password on your router and then enter that password on each computer and other device that you want to connect to your Wi-Fi network. As long as you use a strong password—I recommend using 13 or more mixed-case characters and symbols—you should be fine. In practice, hiding the SSID makes no difference whatsoever to the security of your network.

In fact, it can create more problems than it solves. However, the SSID and network information also get contained within the data packets. This process occurs so that the router knows where to send the packets when transmitted. So, stopping the SSID broadcast does not prevent transmission of your network data as the router needs it to deliver traffic between devices.

Any hacker with a simple network sniffing tool can find out your SSID in seconds, even if you are not broadcasting it. Free tools such as Aircrack , Netstumbler , Kismet , and many others will quickly find out the SSID, channel, security protocol, and other information. By hiding your SSID, you make networking more difficult for yourself while also preventing the addition of any more security to your network.

There are downsides to not broadcasting your SSID, mostly if you use a legacy computer. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Bradley Mitchell. Updated on May 09, Michael Barton Heine Jr. Lifewire Technology Review Board Member. Article reviewed on Jul 18, Tweet Share Email. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error.

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