how does setting your wireless router to be hidden make it less secure ?

First of all that and I have read elsewhere that once you know the hidden ssid it's easier to make connected devices think the hackers device is the wireless router and gain access to the devices.
Edit: i forgot to include the link... http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28653/debunkin … ly-more-secure/

IIRC the client constantly broadcasts the SSID of the "hidden" network.

Anybody who has in mind to hack a wireless network is going to already have the tools available to view hidden networks anyway. Best to use real security features for real security instead of features that were never intended for security.

that article says hidden networks are not more secure than non hidden networks. not that they are less secure

Yes, but read what else I wrote. My post was intended as "furst of all that (link to article) and ..."

original user is a signature spammer.
I expected that with such a generic question with one post.

Moved to Milliways.

BTW, I have WiFi scanning apps on my iPod Touch that show me hidden networks. A surprising number of businesses use them, although I'm not sure what for.

Ironically the highest number of hidden+visible hotspots I've seen at once is in a hospital, which had over 75 hotspots in range of my iPod at one point. I hope nobody goes there for cancer treatment.

Qbix wrote:

original user is a signature spammer.
I expected that with such a generic question with one post.

I thought as much.

I've been using AVG free for a number of years now and, even though it has it's issues, it seems to do it's job well enough (had to disable auto updates though or I get sudden lag when online gaming because my antivirus decides it's time to look for updates -_-

I don't use just an antivir, but also a couple other programs.
I often use Spybot S&D (I like it's teatimer) and occasionally use hijackthis along with a trend online scan.
I've also once tried it's link scanner and wanted away from it after only an hour or so, totally annoying!

The most important thing is, use - your - brain - !!!
This way I've never had a serious infection on one of my own rigs, ever.
(except for once, but that's a story in itself 😜 )

Other than your brain, as every body else mentioned. Then my tips for a good honest safety is this. If you have a clean installed Windows XP Pro (or later Windozes)

Then here goes , Eset Internet Security (configured correctly of course)
Malwarebytes antimalware (to remove some extra, that Eset does not find)
Super Anti Spyware for the last tiny miny bits that neither the two latter found.
Then I can say you are basically golden.

Back in the day before XP I swore to Zygate Firewall Pro, and Eset NOD32 and then ad aware (which rocked back then, but now a days it just plainly SUCKS and is a POS), but when I stopped using ad aware, I used a better anti spyware program that was later bought by Microsoft. That program was a great removal of spyware . But I just can not seem to remember the name of that program..

I switched all my XP and newer Windows machines to Microsoft Security Essentials this year because it feels so much less bloated than AVG and Avast. On my PII-550 with Win98SE, the only still-updated free AV program I've found is ClamWin, which isn't all that great (but is better than nothing).

I used to use Spybot S&D a lot, but I've pretty much stopped except for when I'm worried that I have something that MSE doesn't detect.

I've only ever had 2 viruses (that I know of):

1. A DOS one in the early '90s that added itself to the end of .COM files on my 8MHz 286 with 40MB MFM HDD. I came to recognize the ASCII character pattern corresponding to the virus and manually look at each of my .COM files, replacing or deleting the ones that were infected.

2. A worm around 2001-3, possibly Blaster. It was one of the ones that caused the RPC Service in Win2K to die, sending your computer into a reboot loop.

Norton sucks
McAfee sucks

I would recommend ESET's NOD32 for your Anti-Virus system. It's slick, fast, doesn't slow you down and does an awesome job.

Microsoft Security Essentials for me. It's not very intrusive. It's not very annoying, it's free and, best of all, you CAN ACTUALLY DISABLE REAL-TIME PROTECTION (a nice feature for people like me who prefer manual scans).

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

Microsoft Security Essentials for me. It's not very intrusive. It's not very annoying, it's free and, best of all, you CAN ACTUALLY DISABLE REAL-TIME PROTECTION (a nice feature for people like me who prefer manual scans).

Have they fixed it yet so that the on-demand scanning doesn't close the search results to complain that real-time protection is disabled? That annoying feature made me leave real-time protection turned on when I would rather have it just do weekly scans at night.

I am not sure. After completing a manual scan the window returns to the main tab, yeah, where it's complaining RTP is disabled. If something is found, you must click DETAILS (or Show Details, I have MSE translated to Spanish).

I had problems before Norton 360 - most were systems hogs and really bog down the system. But ever since Norton 360 2010 version, everything is smooth. No slowdowns noted at all. No unnecessary intrusions of pop up windows.

(Note : I've only been using this in Quad Core systems, so can't tell about the performance in lesser cores. But I heard they revamped the engine to run smoothly and is much less of a resource hog.)

Here's a little known secret for anyone who's interested:

If you have a computer which supports UEFI booting, use it instead of traditional MBR booting for your x64 operating system (preferably Windows 7).

Currently there isn't any known rootkit in this world capable of infecting a Windows x64 installation with UEFI boot.

It's highly probable that they will create rootkits to infect them eventually, but in the meantime you'll be enjoying complete immunity to rootkits.

Regards.

Leolo wrote:

Here's a little known secret for anyone who's interested: […]
Show full quote

Here's a little known secret for anyone who's interested:

If you have a computer which supports UEFI booting, use it instead of traditional MBR booting for your x64 operating system (preferably Windows 7).

Currently there isn't any known rootkit in this world capable of infecting a Windows x64 installation with UEFI boot.

It's highly probable that they will create rootkits to infect them eventually, but in the meantime you'll be enjoying complete immunity to rootkits.

Regards.

How do you choose which booting method to use? How do you tell what you're using now? I think most of my systems are using UEFI because there's a weird little partition that Windows created at the beginning of the disks.

Run "bcdedit" in a command prompt (with admin privileges) and look for the "path" value under "Windows Boot Loader".

If it says "\windows\system32\winload.exe", you're using traditional MBR booting.

If it says "\efi\microsoft\boot\bootmgfw.efi", then you're using the new UEFI boot.

Changing the booting style is a bit difficult and risky. But if you're completely sure that your system supports UEFI and are courageous enough, you can follow this guide:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=186440

Regards.

Seeing as people are advocating Microsoft Security Essentials I've been trying it out in place of AVG on my Windows 7 and Windows XP boxes.

On 7, it seems fine, sticking with it so far.

On XP, it gave me sporadic "windows is not genuine" errors. Microsoft's own fix [to do with data.dat permissions] did not work. But because the problem is sporadic, it's a few hours before I find out. I guess it's to do with how often it contacts their server or something.

Quite irritating that they could release something in this state, maybe this shows a lack of pretty basic integration testing. More likely, they don't much care for XP any more so didn't test it fully.

But either way. on that basis I would not recommend MSE for XP. Gone back to AVG Free now. Pity because I'm sure it booted faster with mse.

Try this tool, maybe it will give you more info about the problem:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52012