General Wardriving Tutorial

[steve.milner]

I am not advocating that information of this sort should be hidden because it arms people with potentially dangerous information - There are lots of sources of info on this site and elsewhere that can do that.

What I am concerned about are the motives for writing this tutorial.

It looks & reads just like "I'm a clever little war driver, so I'll tell you how to do it & you'll give me respect" even if that wasn't the intention.

In the tutorial it goes into great detail including information which is completely irellevant to understanding the subject and how to secure yourself from it :

1. Place your laptop running NetStumbler somewhere in your vehicle
where it won't be a distraction. Cell phones are bad, but laptops are
definately worse!

How is this going to help me protect my hifi - Add a little more distraction and maybe the wardriver will crash?

2. If you do not have an antenna, you'll need to be a little more
cautious when driving around, because networks won't necessarily show
up if you're blazing by at 60mph. I usually go about 35-40mph until
an AP shows up, then I slow down to about 15-20mph. This helps me
pinpoint exactly which home/business is running the network.

Okay, so I need to encourage people not to drive slowly around my wifi or I should only install them near the freeway.

Perhaps I should accost people driving slowly and accuse them of wardriving.

5. When your battery dies, or you run out of gas... that's usually the
sign that your wardriving episode for the day is over. If it was the
battery, go home and charge it until next time. If it was the gas,
you're just plain stupid then.

I see, install my wifi away from gas stations as well.

Can you justify this information as a tutorial to help me protect myself from this?

By all means I want to know the technicalities of how its done, but not the practicalities!

What I need are the practicalities to protect myself.

Is it any wonder that I read the this tutorial as either someone teaching people how to perform illegal activities or a plain and simple boast.

If this is the kind of tutorial that represents what is acceptable round here then maybe someone could write me a tutorial that step by step tells me how to hack hotmail!

I know I'm new round here, but this isn't what I came here to learn about and I didn't think it's what the community wanted.

I've ranted enough now - I'll take this to PM for any further argument.

[Plastic]

very true.. it's just frustating to me how the black hats are always one step ahead, and the white hats are always one step behind trying to patch or fix the last thing the black hats did. the company that I intern for hires themselves out to break into networks and assess the vulnerabilities in their networks... so we're kinda trained to think with that mindset... pretty fun stuff.

[NeuTron]

Originally posted here by el-half
In my opinion this guy doesn't have to be negged as it is a good tutorial but he doesn't deserve any positive either because it's written from the cracker's perspective.

I don't agree that it is a good tutorial, but I have seen far worse tuts go without being negged. Look at his AP status anyway, does he really desere to be banned because of this tut. He didn't write it for himself, he wrote it to benefit somebody else.

Plastik- You chose a very touchy subject to write on. The majority of the people here are not going to appreciate a "how to" on wardriving. If you had written a "how to" on protecting a WiFi network with a small section on what a cracker would do to penetrate your network, you would have been flooded with positves. War driving's negatives far outweigh it's positives and you basically enabled any script kiddie to go and reak havok on his neighborhood's WiFi networks. In addition, you didn't supply any new information, everything you posted is almost surely known by the members here. It might have been nice to see something new about the subject of wardriving. I'm not going to neg you on this but I still suggest you delete this tut and the other one on the same subject and pick a new subject.
-NeuTron

[Plastic]

.. expect a tutorial soon on how to secure your wireless network .. i didn't mean to cause so much commotion over this... but security is the #1 priority, so yes, expect a tut on how to secure wireless networks

[el-half]

NeuTron that's what I mean by good, not that it's sublime but it's not bad either. So he doesn't deserve negs he!

[tonybradley]

While teaching someone how to do this does skirt a number of legal issues, I have found wardriving my own or my client's areas of operation to be effective in finding security issues or open AP's. It is like performing your own penetration test on your wireless network.

From that perspective this tutorial can be useful. However, because I would be scanning my own, or at least known buildings and networks I would not need a GPS or need to write down the exact location per se.

Anyway- just my $.02 that there actually IS a valid and useful purpose for wardriving.

Plus, Plastics makes a valid point that nothing has been stolen just in the detection. If I drive down the street and make a note of how many homes have the door wide open it doesn't make me guilty of breaking and entering or trespassing. Its a shady practice to get into, but its not illegal in and of itself.

[forn28]

Wardriving by itself is legal under Canadian laws... But it isn't to publish the information found when you wardrive (the dump, map, etc...) and to use without permission bandwidth of others. I do not know American law well, but common sense told that the same kind of laws applied, but sometime some American laws look strange for foreigner ;-) I do not see why it should be illegal… By doing so, the technology by itself will be illegal (wifi probe for network) ;-p

[Plastic]

Detection (and ONLY detection) of networks is legal in the U.S., and posting this detection info is also legal. However, the second anybody (without authorization) connects to a network, they have crossed over to the illegal side.

[Cybr1d]

here's two more cent : Plastic, i dont think there was a need to neg you and i'm glad you are out of the red dots but be more careful on how you word your posts/tuts in the future. The post did indeed sound like a boast of your "Skills" as a wardriver and u indeed did mention on how to do it and not how to protect yourself from it. Perhaps your intentions were to teach us how to protect ourselves and if they were, thank you . Just be more careful in your wording. I can recall by experience that i've been negged a few times because the way i worded my posts. Looking forward to future posts by you.

[Plastic]

yea... i think i've now seen what can happen

try to re-word myself a lil differently nexttime