What is wardriving?
07/08/2008 00:00:00 Paul Vlissidis, Technical Director, penetration and security testing company, NCC Group SecureTest commented on what wardriving involves and the implications. Vlissidis explained: “In some cases you’re talking about the equivalent of locking the side gate with a suitcase padlock- it’s that insecure.” In The Press Facebook DZone It! Digg It! StumbleUpon Technorati Del.icio.us NewsVine Reddit Blinklist Furl it!
Wardriving is the gathering of statistics about wireless networks in a given area by listening for their publicly available broadcast beacons. Wireless access points (APs) announce their presence at set intervals (usually every 100 milliseconds) by broadcasting a packet containing their service set identifier (SSID; basically, the user-defined name of the access point) and several other data items. A stumbling utility running on a portable computer of some sort (a laptop or PDA) listens for these broadcasts and records the data that the AP makes publicly available. When you wardrive, you drive around in your car while running a stumbling utility, and record beacons from nearby APs. Most stumbling utilities have the ability to add GPS location information to their log files, so that the geographical positions of stumbled APs (often called “stations” by insiders) may be retained and plotted on electronic maps like those produced by Microsoft’s MapPoint software. The overwhelming favorite
