Since we all have a wifi network at home today and given how simple it can be for a person capable of finding ways to access and use it at our expense, a rather effective security measure is to hide the network so that it is undetectable from some computer or mobile phone . The SSID acronym stands for Service Set Identifier and is practically the name of the wifi network that is assigned by the router.
For example, the wifi network of my house is called Navigaweb, because it is the name that I configured in the settings of my router.
In other cases, the network name may be the default one, such as FASTWEB-1-8zdsfsda or something, because its owner has never changed it.
So the SSID is nothing but the name that is transmitted by the router in order to make the Wifi network visible and allow the devices to connect.
If you go to disable the transmission of the SSID (SSID Broadcast) or hide the wifi network, what happens is that no other device can find the Wi-Fi router and, therefore, connect to the internet.
Although anyone can use trivial and simple wireless scanner programs to find each wifi network and also detect the name of hidden networks, turning off the SSID Broadcast makes things a little more difficult, also because to find our SSID you should know that exists or find it randomly.
Before seeing how to disable the SSID of the wifi network, which is quite simple to do, it is important to understand the consequences of this action.
In general, on a home network, the transmission of the SSID, unless you connect more access points and routers together, is nothing more than a convenience.
If you are using a single wireless router at home, before deciding whether to disable the SSID Broadcast, you need to think not only about the security benefits, but also about a practical disadvantage.
In fact, if a friend comes to home who wants to connect to Wifi, it is necessary for this person to manually enter the name of the network, in practice to add the SSID which is invisible and not detected by the scan of the wifi networks of the computer or smartphone.
Using this technique definitely reduces the risks of seeing intruders in your Wifi network, (especially if you live in the city center, with many neighbors or in areas with a lot of traffic and passage), but you have to accept a little more effort to connect new devices to the network.
In addition, hiding the SSID also automatically disables access via WPS.
Obviously, nothing will change for devices already connected to this network.
To disable the transmission or broadcast of the SSID and hide the network it is only necessary to connect to this network and then log in to the router as an administrator.
If we have a standard network we can then open a new browser tab at 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, enter the username and password which if they have never been changed should be admin admin .
At this point the administration screen is different depending on the router model and language.
Let's say, in general, you should find the option that hides the name of the SSID network under the settings of your home network or wireless access points.
At that point you can search for the option of Broadcast SSID or Broadcast SSID or even hide SSID to make the network name no longer appear in the scans.
The network will now be invisible and you can only connect via manual connection (in Windows the manual connection is done from the Network and Sharing Center, by clicking on Configure new connection> Manually connect to a wireless network; on Android, in the Wifi Settings screen, you have to press the option button at the top right and then on Add network ).
This is just one of the options to secure the wifi network and although as a measure it is really very light, it can prove to be the same effective, compared to other strong solutions, but uncomfortable and bypassable the same as that of allowing access only to certain MAC Address and disable DHCP.
