I think someone HACKED into my Network..please help!

Question

Hi,
I have a Powerbook, 4 years old,never had any trouble with network changes or losing control with settings.
Recently I was logged into Messenger and was disconnected with the message *+"you were disconnected because you were logged in at another device or terminal"+*. Which was very odd. I logged out and logged in again and it came up again shortly thereafter. Then I went into my System Preferences/Network and when it popped up a message said "Your network settings have been changed by another application". This definitely didn't smell right.
I'm the only one who controls the network settings,it's a home/internet network. I use a Mac Airport Base Station.
Please help with any insight or suggestions on how to change my settings back or what to do. Thank you.

Answer 1

BGreg wrote:
Yes, a closed network doesn't broadcast the name (SSID) of the network.
If you want to be absolutely sure somebody can't get into your network, enable the mac address control, which will only allow the defined systems to use your network.
Actually, the only setting that really matters is WPA.
The WPA layer is the most hack-proof security method, so if a hacker is good enough to get through WPA, no other layers will stop them. The hidden SSID can easily be sniffed out of the air and then accessed, and the MAC address filter can be evaded by, again, simply sniffing the transmissions and then cloning the MAC address of the client machine that's obviously allowed in, so that the router thinks the hacker's machine is your machine.
With WPA the one thing you have to do is use a password that isn't in any dictionary, since the only attack WPA is vulnerable to is a dictionary attack. If you can avoid that through the intelligent choice of a password, WPA is pretty solid, especially WPA2.