As a junior security analyst for a small business, you are tasked with setting up the company's first wireless network. The company wants to ensure the network is secure from potential attacks. Given

Hiding the SSID offers minimal security as it can be easily discovered by sniffing tools and does not encrypt network traffic, making it ineffective against determined attackers.

Enabling WPA2 or WPA3 encryption is the most critical and foundational security measure for any wireless network because it provides robust authentication and strong encryption for all data transmitted wirelessly. This prevents unauthorized users from easily accessing the network and eavesdropping on communications, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of business data without significant ongoing management complexity for a small workforce.

Implementing MAC address whitelisting can be easily bypassed by MAC spoofing, and it adds significant administrative overhead for managing approved devices, which conflicts with the need for simplicity.

While regularly changing the network password is good practice, it is secondary to having strong encryption; without WPA2/WPA3, the network remains vulnerable to eavesdropping regardless of password changes.