Most of the wireless routers today comes with some security feature such as security encryption (WEP/WPA), MAC address filtering, lowering transmission power, disabling DHCP & use static IP, and hiding of SSID to help keep your wireless network safe from intruders. Each wireless security mechanism helps to increase the difficulty of unauthorized users from hacking in to your wireless networks but surely does not prevent the determined ones. In this article we will be focusing on one of the option “Broadcast SSID” found in most wireless routers.Basically when the broadcast SSID option is enabled, all wireless capable devices can see your router listed together with a bunch of other wireless networks. This option provides a convenience for you to easily connect to it by clicking on your SSID and entering the security key. However, this also allows the nearby hackers to find your network and also see the signal strength with the security type being used directly from Windows without even the need to run a network scanning tool. Non broadcasting wireless networks are not totally invisible as well because they can be detected by any of the 8 tools mentioned below.
1. inSSIDer
inSSIDer is the most popular free and open source Wi-Fi scanning tool available today. It is easy to use and understand without all the confusing configuration. After installation, running inSSIDer will automatically select your wireless adapter to start scanning for available access points. Then the results will be shown in a sortable table in the program displaying information such as SSID, channel, security, RSSI, MAC Address, maximum rate, vendor and network type.
The hidden wireless network is shown in the first line with an empty SSID but the rest of the information about the network is displayed. inSSIDer works on Windows XP/Vista/7 (32-bit & 64-bit) and also on Android and Mac.
Download inSSIDer
2. WirelessNetView
Another excellent small and portable utility by Nir Sofer called WirelessNetView allows you to view the available wireless networks around you. By placing the OUI database at the same folder as WirelessNetView, it can even show the brand of the wireless router based on the MAC address. It is possible to generate a HTML report file from the right click context menu and it also has command line support to save the list of wireless networks into an external TXT, CSV, HTML or XML file.
The hidden wireless network is shown without a SSID. A unique feature found in WirelessNetView is the ability to restart Windows Wireless Service from the Options toolbar or alternatively from the hotkey Ctrl+R. WirelessNetView works from Windows XP to Windows 7.
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