It has been reported here often enough that VM are certainly aware of the issue, but deep down, VM's management culture is a bit like Bojo, they can never admit fault. If they admit it is a bug, they put themselves under pressure to fix it, but whilst it remains unadmitted they don't commit themselves to anything.
In terms of security, no difference. Most consumer wifi has more security holes than Swiss cheese, due to the nature of the protocols and security involved. It doesn't matter what the SSID is, it can still be easily detected and hacked by those with the skills and equipment to do so. In practice, foreign state sponsored hackers are unlikely to be targeting you unless you're already hacking them (in which case you wouldn't be asking questions here), the UK's security services can just ask VM for all and any data on you and your activity, and non-state hackers will simply do a "war drive" looking for completely unsecured wifi to piggy back on.
There is a solution to the problem of the hub losing or randomly changing settings, and that's to buy your own router or mesh and run the hub in modem mode. Do that, and you get better wifi, better control, probably better security, and best of all, VM can't beggar up the settings through existing faulty firmware, or through the new bugs that routinely arise when they try and fix an existing fault.
