Introduction

In the fall of 2000, Peter Shipley, a network security consultant in San Francisco, began a project to raise awareness about the security risks of open wireless networks. Basically, he drove around the bay area collecting wireless data that showed that most wireless network deployments failed to take even basic security precautions, such as enabling WEP..

He called this activity war driving, a loose reference to war dialing from the 1983 movie War Games in which Matthew Broderick used his computer to automatically dial an entire bank of phone numbers in an attempt to locate other modems and identify computer systems that he could connect to.

This chapter will introduce you to the tools and techniques for war driving and identifying wireless networks. While our intent is defensive in nature, this chapter will walk you through the process of setting up your own AP discovery kit. After all, sometimes the best way to defend against attackers is to understand their ways. As Sun Tsu would say, know your enemy.