How can I block neighboring wireless networks?

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A very timely acticle. I have just upgraded to
wireless, and right off experienced an
unprotected wireless network that overpowered my
system. I am not that familiar yet with Wireless Networks, WEP,or WPA .Could you go into some detail on WEP or WPA in another article.
Is their any third party 'blocking utility' available that would protect you from this.
My service provider was of no help.
Thank's for a very informative article.

I would also like to add to the article an important point that was missed. When setting up your passphrase with WPA, it's so important that you have a 'Strong' password. I graduated last year with a networking degree and one of the things we did in our wireless class was to break into WEP and also WPA. In fact, I think WPA can be easier at times to break into. The way we did this was a dictionary attack. There are plenty of articles on the net using linux on how to do this. So make that passphrase strong, and you shouldn't have many problems.

Regarding the disabling of SSID broadcast...

You can change the SSID prior to disabling the broadcast, allow your system(s) to detect it and configure the connection, and then disable the broadcast. This is a lot easier than manually configuring it when renaming it after disabling SSID broadcast.

Of course, it does leave a window of opportunity for your neighbor (and others) to see the new SSID, so you need to weigh the convenience versus the security.

Thanks for the thorough explanation and the advice. Sounds like a good idea to hide the SSID -I just need to check if the router allows it (but since I'm about to get a faster one, I'll pick one that does). As I live in an apartment block and there are a couple dozen diferent signals appearing on the wireless detector, if mine goes anonimous then I cannot see how the said neighbor can easily pick anything up in the middle of all the others.

Sounds like a "For Sale" sign might be necessary in the near future???

I'm curious as to why you didn't recommend limiting the MAC addresses that the router would allow to connect?

I'm curious as to why you didn't recommend limiting the MAC addresses that the router would allow to connect?

If I remember correctly from my classes, the tools we used was able to view the MAC addresses of all the computers that are attached to a network. Once you have that, there are another set of tools you can use to spoof your own MAC address. Once you have spoofed your own MAC, you then have the rights to login to the network; provided you have used the other tools correctly to get the WPA passphrase. Again, I can't stress enough a Strong Passphrase.

Isn't there an issue with wireless networks that are deleted from the preferred networks window, again re-appearing in the same window at some point in the future? Seems I've seen that before. Right now I've not seen a way to restrict these adjacent wireless networks from being discovered by a wireless laptop. And that can be a pain sometimes for the very issue the original poster was writing about.

One thing you can do is to make sure that your "absolute" preferred network, is at the very top of this list, as that will be the first one that your wireless device will attempt to connect to -

One other note, is most wireless setups will default to running on channel 6 for their wireless communications frequency. I'd go in and change from the default 6 to channel 11. You have to do that within your wireless router and laptop wireless adapter. If the guys neighbor is running ch6 and your original poster changes his setup to run on ch 11, that may help with his wireless always attemtping to connect to the neighbors network.

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