Re: Florida Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal
There a few different ways to protect the AP. One of them is WEP which, as Bandoosta said, can be creaked (but then again what can't be cracked these days). On my AP I also have MAC filtering enabled. MAC is a unique identifier for all NIC's, so the AP checks to see if the new MAC is listed in its list and then it asks for the WEP key.
WPA (wifi Protected Access) is another way to protect the AP, and at home u can use the pre-shared key, or at work you can use RADIUS or something similar.