The system does not respond to scans, and the devices behind it cannot be discovered or analyzed, preventing known or zero-day vulnerability exploitation.
Secondary Usage: The term has also been used to refer to wireless security by hiding the network name (service set identifier) from being broadcast publicly.
Many routers come with this option as a standard feature in the setup menu accessed via a web browser.
There are many programs that are able to scan for wireless networks, including hidden ones, and display their information such as IP addresses, SSIDs, and encryption types.
[3][4] The reason these programs can sniff out the hidden networks is because when the SSID is transmitted in the various frames, it is displayed in cleartext (unencrypted format), and therefore able to be read by anyone who has found it.
An eavesdropper can passively sniff the wireless traffic on that network undetected (with software like Kismet), and wait for someone to connect, revealing the SSID.
Worse still, because a station must probe for a hidden SSID, a fake access point can offer a connection.