Last Updated on December 2, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
This is probably an obvious development, but it is a bit disturbing. It appears that the Google vans doing the street view in Germany are also collecting wifi information including SSID and MAC Addresses. The SSID is the name you are giving your WIFI system. That is moderately disturbing. The MAC address is a lot more disturbing. The MAC address is a unique address given to a network interface (i.e. a cable or wifi interface).
What this means is that there will now be a database that will cross reference MAC addresses to a current physical location. It will also mean that, if the information were made public by Google, hackers will be able to easily find wireless access points. If the information includes the security status, then they can seek out unsecured Wifi points. This is a danger in that hackers can use unsecured wifi for illegal activities such as: distributing illegal porn, hacking, ecommerce theft and sending spam.
What you can do
1. Make sure that your wifi system has the best encryption available to your equipment. WEP is an older and less secure encryption. There are various versions of WPA that provide increasing levels of security.
2. Consider setting your wifi system to only allow connections to devices with an allowed MAC address. This is a bit more complicated in that you need to list the MAC addresses that are allowed to access your Wifi. If you have visitors you will need to add the MAC addresses of their equipment to allow access.
3. Most wifi systems are in a broadcast mode where it will broadcast the SSID or identifier of your wifi. This can be turned off which will probably prevent being cataloged. Once again, this increases the complexity of your wifi network.
Keep in mind that wifi access is hackable. A hacker can use a sniffer to grab and analyze the traffic. Eventually they will be able to access your wifi network.
The original article in The Register is here