You are concerned about war driving bringing hackers attention to your wireless network. What is the most basic step you can take to mitigate this risk?

WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is a deprecated and cryptographically broken encryption protocol that does not adequately protect a wireless network and does not address the visibility issue that war driving exploits.

War driving involves passively scanning for wireless networks that are broadcasting their SSID. By disabling SSID broadcast, the access point no longer advertises its presence in beacon frames, making the network invisible to basic scanning tools used by war drivers. This is the most fundamental and low-effort first step to reduce exposure, even though determined attackers can still discover hidden SSIDs through other means.

MAC address filtering restricts which devices can connect to the network but does not prevent the network from being discovered by war drivers scanning for SSIDs.

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) provides stronger encryption than WEP but still broadcasts the SSID by default, so the network remains visible to war drivers.