Wireless Practices

Hackers are spending a good amount of time exploiting wireless networks. Hackers began war dialing ” dialing phone numbers until they found an open modem ” to access networks. The 1990s Internet boom created easier and more direct avenues of attack, such as Internet Protocol scanners and packet sniffers. LANs are inherently more secure than WLANs because LANs are somewhat protected by the physical aspects of their structure, having some or all parts of the network inside a building that can be protected from unauthorized access. WLANs, which are over radio waves, do not have the same physical structure and therefore are more vulnerable to tampering. The configuration of the 802.11b protocol allows ease of access to all trusted and not-so-trusted users. This openness has created the next generation of network intrusion: war driving .

War driving is using a laptop s wireless NIC set in a promiscuous mode to pick up unsecured WLAN signals. At this stage of the game, hackers are war driving around seeking ” or LAN-jacking , as it is sometimes called ” wireless networks for anonymous and free high-speed Internet access. Wireless LAN war drivers routinely drive in their cars equipped with laptops loaded with a wireless LAN card, an external high- gain antenna and a global positioning system receiver. The wireless LAN card and GPS receiver feed signals into freeware, such as NetStumbler, to detect access points and their identifiers along with their GPS-derived locations. A permutation of war driving is war flying, where the vehicle is a plane instead of a car. In academic settings, students have been known to walk with laptops enabled with scanning software to locate access points in buildings . The activity of locating access points has really taken off in the past few years .

To mark AP locations, hackers use a technique called war chalking ( www.warchalking.org ). They simply use chalk to place a special symbol on a sidewalk or other surface that indicates a nearby wireless network, especially one that offers Internet access. War driving and war chalking are activities that can be thought of as counter-cultural since the intended audience may not be the owner of the network that is targeted . Over the past couple of years many people have come together to support a global war-driving day when all the individual participants provide the data from the war driving experience to a central database. This is an idea with great commercial promise. Many mainstream retailers (including Starbucks Coffee and Kinko s) have witnessed the appeal of wireless devices and have embraced the newest trend ” hotspots.