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Wardriving

Wardriving is something you should be aware of if you have a wireless enabled hub on your computer. Wifi, wireless networking, is generally wide-open networking and it's important to know about the prevalence of poor security. It's also important to know about the ethics, as wardrivers are generally not into hacking into your computer system, and are likely to be freeloading on your bandwidth, which is usually (though not always) ok. If you have a static system it's therefore best if you either have proper security or you have a freeloader-friendly policy! Linux helps.

Wardriving is a bit like freeloading on seats outside restaurants, where the eateries themselves might or might not have an open policy on people coming along and using their seats for eating their own lunch without paying. In Camden Market, many take-aways share the same tables and benches, and it's usually ok to eat your own packed lunch there if there's plenty of space. You'd not poke about in someone's house if they had left the door open, but you might lob on their garden wall if it was cheaper than paying corkage at the restaurant.

You can understand where there are a diverse range of different ethics about this sort of thing out there!

Another analogy involves the fact that some people often watch their television and leave the curtains open. In wardriving, it's important to understand that the eyes looking in are not primarily looking at you and your front room (hacking), but are trying to get a free bandwidth.

Here are some helpful links for wi-fi and general war-driving info sources at the end:

http://webcrack.sf.net/

http://dachboden.com/projects/dwebcrack.html BSD version

http://www.e.kth.se/~pvz/wifi/ Linux version

http://airsnort.shmoo.com/

http://www.kismetwireless.net/ - Kismet

http://www.ethereal.com/ generic network sniffer

http://pygps.org/gpsd/gpsd.html gps demon

http://www.wellenreiter.net/ like kismet

http://www.thc.org/download.php?t=r&d=wardrive-2.3.tar.gz

http://prismstumbler.sourceforge.net/ for prism cards only

http://sourceforge.net/projects/warlinux a specialist Linux distro for wardriving

http://wifiscanner.sf.net/ similar to Kismet

http://www.nodedb.org/ a hotspot database

http://www.wardriving.com/ the wardriving howto

This article: http://www.samag.com/documents/s=7121/sam0205b/sam0205b.htm gives a good overview of what is wrong with wep.

Net Stumbler is a generally available wi-fi sniffing system available for Windows.

Kismet is somewhat more hacker able, and is available for various Linux distributions.

Special note: If you go wardriving it's best to not be on any particular network for very long, and it's especially important to avoid being a bandwidth nuisance, and to try to avoid connections which cost other people money.