AirTight

Wardriving is the act of roaming around in a moving vehicle and locate WiFi networks in the immediate vicinity. Most War drivers are also in the habit of accurately mapping their findings using a GPS. A typical wardriver’s toolbox has a laptop, a WiFi card, a GPS, an external antenna and even a power backup at times.

There has been quite a lot of debate if wardriving constitutes a crime or not. Many countries do not ban wardriving as long as the wardriver does not connect illegally to the access points he discovers by scanning. On the positive side, wardriving also demonstrates how vulnerable most wireless deployments are and the need for a more proactive approach to make sure hackers do not take advantage of these open backdoors. Interestingly, sites like Wigle.net maintain a large database of such wardriving scans and provide useful insight into the use and pervasiveness of WiFi.

The phenomenon of wardriving became so widespread that it gave rise to another called warchalking in which hackers used to leave signs using chalks to denote the availability of WiFi networks in the vicinity and their security settings. Here are the different signs used by hackers to make the otherwise invisible WiFi networks visible!