Quote Originally Posted by BOB IROC
Blocking your SSID and using MAC filtering will help at least a little bit with those situations. Don't ya think?
eh, not so much. Both are spoofable, rather easily, using widely available tools with little know-how, but the encryption isn't (assuming you use something OTHER than WEP). I would say, yes turn on your mac filter, but ssid broadcast takes you out of 802.11 compliance...there are reasons this is in the standard.

On paper, if someone's next door, they'll see your network at some point, regardless of SSID turned off. So thats out. If you leave it off, I see it once, setup a fake AP and cause all sorts of hell. Leave yours on, turn on encryption (NOT WEP!!) and those problems are fixed and its much MUCH harder for me to do something evil.

Pre-shared keys are still a "shared secret", but its a billion times better than using static, easily spoofable, interruptable, etc info. AES and TKIP are damn good and I highly recommend them because they're a bitch to crack (got a few galaxy lifetimes sittin around?). The chances of someone busting through that is ungodly unlikely where the others are rather simple.