Doctor Recommended

War driving, WiLDing and WAPS

I spent the better part of last night, partaking in what used to be referred to as “war driving.” Despite our lack of grenades and bazookas, my amigo Andrew and I tore through neighborhoods, laying waste to radio frequencies left and right. Notwithstanding its menacing name, nothing war-like took place. The term actually came about several years ago because some curious individuals would exploit weaknesses in wireless security to hack into businesses via their wireless networks (the actual history goes back to war dialing and the movie WarGames, another discussion for another time).

In fact, other groups (like the well-known Bay Area Wireless User Group) have renamed the act of scouring for open access points, to “nicer” names like Wireless Lan Driving (WiLDing), Wireless Access Reconnaissance and Wireless Activist Reality. Well since everyone else is doing it (I’d jump off a cliff too), I propose: Wireless Access Point Sniffing or Surfing or Sexating or Skintitilating.

Anyways, along to bumping into zounds of college chicas that were impressed with our uber geekness, we found dozens of open, insecure access points up and down the streets of North Dallas (Plano area, between Preston and Coit). All that was needed was a “sniffer” (we tried 5 different ones; this Boingo program was the best) and a WiFi card. The antenna inside my laptop was able to capture signals a little bit better than Andrew’s (I thank Hermes), so take that into consideration if you try to emulate my skillz (note: the real reason is most probably due to power settings, his is powered by a Crusoe chip, and is therefore designed primarily for power conservation, so the antenna is not trying to suck chrome off a hub cap as is my Gateway 450XL, which does).

On more than one occasion (all near the UT Dallas campus), several WiFi networks we detected, named themselves after the apartment they resided in (like Free_DSL_Apartment_1013) which shows that some users understand that individuals like me look around for access points to use (for evil P2P purposes and such).

Among other network names, “default” was the most popular (snicker), followed closely by “wireless.” Additionally we found oodles of “tmobile” hot spots. My favorite however were “linksys,” because just about every one of these was left open for surfers to toy with (oh, and for you Mac aficionados, we found 4 “airports” in our rampage).

Despite our red-letter-day we were disappointed at the end, Denny’s was not outfitted with WiFi capabilities. How absurd!

Oh, and yea, I did knock on Apartment 1013’s door, no one opened at 1:37 am though, strange.

Posted by Tim at June 21, 2003 03:52 PM | TrackBack