Wardriving
For a while I have thought about getting in my car with my laptop (with wireless antenna) and wandering around town seeing how many wireless routers there are out there just leaking (free) bandwidth into the street. I start looking around and stumbled onto (pun intended ) http://www.netstumbler.com/ which is a nice little program that simply sniffs out wireless access points and logs them. It notes if the network is open, how good a connection it is, the name of the network and other technical stuff. So I loaded in on my machine and went over to Radioshack to get a cord such that I could hook up my old Garmin GPS CX12 to it so I could get the Lat/Long of the networks as well (and put them into the log)
In looking around for some more support stuff (maps and such) I noticed a whole bunch of interesting information. There are organizations that support this activity (wardriving) And when you look at the statistics, over half of teh millions of ‘found’ networks out there are open, meaning, anyone can just drive up and jump on peoples networks and use their bandwidth. No ‘hacking’ involved. Free IP’s for teh taking.
Then there are some really creative pieces of software out there that are pure evil. There is one that makes your machine look like a wireless access point. Other people log ‘into’ your BS access point and you then forward them onto the real one (this is done in airports, restaurants, and other places where lots of people are trying to log into the access point. The hitch is that everything the person types and sends accross to teh network (passwords and such) goes through the bad guy’s machine. They of course can then log it and use it in evil ways. Scary, huh? The code is available and they say it was released so teh world could see how vunerable wirless networks really are.
I drove approximately 4 miles yesterday (2 miles to teh mall, two miles back, by different routes) and my laptop detected 83 unique access points. Of those 83, 46 of them were wide open. No security whatsoever. I even found how MY password protected network can get hacked with pateince and a piece of software. I am not too worried as there are so many free and open networks in my neighborhood, I woudl assume a hacker would hit those before they tried to crack mine. Thats the hope anyways.