08/26/2002 Entry: "Wardriving"

I spent yesterday evening driving around with my friend Tim looking for wireless access points. I usually read about people doing this with fancy external antennae, but we just used the equipment we had on hand, which was a simple pcmcia 802.11b card. This turned out to be perfectly adequate. After we were done, we had found 79 access points, 52 of those did not have encryption turned on.

Our two favorite network IDs found were "bridaljewelry" and "MyHomeInIrvineCA92618." Then, the most amusing moment was when we were driving around a business park in Irvine and found an open access point outside a business called "Wireless Car."

A partial map of the networks we found can be seen here.

31 of the access points we found were still using the default network name, although four of those had encryption turned on. But any of the remaining 27 would likely allow us access to the internet. If you have a wireless access point, you should secure it by making it a "closed" network, so it can't be seen by software like Netstumbler; enable WEP encryption so that only people with the key can talk to the access point; and configure the access point to only allow wireless cards with the specific MAC addresses of your cards to communicate with it.