A northeastern city had developed an initiative to provide free, public WiFi in a downtown, outdoor area. The city had invested a great deal of money into revitalizing the area, and improving the wireless infrastructure was part of the mayor’s vision for creating a 21st century, connected city that would attract tech-savvy young professionals and leading conferences to the area. Municipal wireless would also add value for residents of the city, particularly lower-income residents who lacked access to internet in their homes.
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When working with various customers on their wireless networks, I am often asked about the broadcasting of Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs) – or the name of the Wi-Fi network – as a security risk. At one time, broadcasting of SSIDs was seen as a security issue, and therefore almost everyone disabled broadcasting. Since that time, we have grown as an industry in our understanding of this practice to the point where it is generally considered best practice to broadcast SSIDs. As an example, PCI DSS v1.2 removed the requirement for SSIDs to be non-broadcast in order to be PCI compliant.
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