If you shut off your SSID broadcast, it will hide you from people using NetStumbler (which basically shouts every second “Hey AP, are you there?”). However, Kismet is designed to merely listen to the airwaves and so it will pick out non-broadcasted SSID’s by simply listening to any traffic between the computers and the WAP they’re talking to.

Like the fellow above said, MAC addresses can easily be plucked out of the air and cloned. Same goes for IP addresses.

If you are relegated to using WEP, use the very longest password you can that is a random mix of upper/lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks and if you can use 128 bit WEP, do it. Same goes for WPA. In fact for WPA, the only attack I’ve read about involves taking advantage of the fact that some people use passwords less than 32 bytes. It’ll take the encrypted password and run it against a dictionary. I’ve read that a password longer than 32 bytes will undermine this technique pretty well.

In the end, if you follow all the basic steps that are recommended in the home wireless networking guides, only a more determined hacker will be able to get into your network. Hackers with that level of skill would most likely not even bother with your machine and would rather hit a corporate network or steal the bandwidth of a less secure network. Those who run corporate networks go the extra step of setting up a login system that requires you to login and prove you are who you claim to be in order to even connect to the network. In this case, the hacker may still break the crypto and listen in to the networking traffic but they’ll never be able to become part of the network, unless they know of some flaw in the login system.

>>2. settign the router to ONLY allow specific MAC >>address wireless cards.

>>I would think that in particular, #2 would stop >>anybody dead in their tracks,

Getting and cloning your MAC ID is the easiest thing to do. Then it is easy to use your connection under your nose.

I would think that in particular, #2 would stop anybody dead in their tracks, even if they got past #1

WEP just seems too much given that #1 and #2 are done right - is that not a good assessment?

jay