Girl Geekette

Back in the first article, Wireless Networking - At What Cost? , John Hancock was introduced. He had just bought all of his supplies at Circuit City to set up a wireless network at his home. He bought a new laptop that has a built in B/G network card and a wireless access point. When he got home, he simply set up the access point, went through a simple configuration wizard and was on the network in less than fifteen minutes surfing the internet with his high speed internet cable modem and his new laptop. John did not take any security precautions when he set it up. He did not think he needed any type of security on his network. Because the type of wireless router he bought is also considered a firewall, and because he has a software firewall on his laptop, he did not even consider the need to have any kind of security set up on his network. It was also mentioned in this article what when he received an alert from his software firewall that he did not pay any attention to the alert. He did not notice that it was coming from inside his network, not from the internet.

Later, in the article Wireless Networking - What others can see, you were introduced to some of the things that can be seen or done on an unsecured network The idea that someone can see the traffic from the wireless computer to the wireless access point if there is no encryption. Could any credit card information or personal information be seen? Yes. There are actually more things that can be seen than just the obvious ones too. The IP address scheme of a network, MAC addresses, and SSIDs are just a few things. Username and passwords that are sent while using a mail client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail, Netscape Netmail or others to retrieve mail are seen in plain text as they pass through the network card to the WAP.

The other person accessing the network could have been anyone. It could have been someone across the street who joined the network on accident. It could have been someone who was Warchalking or Wardriving around the neighbourhood. A bit more far fetched, but it could have even been someone warflying. All of the terms - Warchalking, Wardriving, Warflying represent the idea searching for wireless access points. In John’s case, whichever method was used, his WAP was found and the wireless network was joined by an unauthorized user.

In the 1983 movie War Games, Matthew Broderick’s character gave a name of "wardialing" to the idea of continuously dialing to search for accessible computers (Before this, it was called Demon Dialing). During the fall of 2000, Peter Shipley took a survey of all of the wireless access points in Berkley over a period of 18 months. He presented his reports to a DefCon convention of June of 2001. This inspired the idea of presenting the insecurities of wireless networks and here began the term Wardriving. Later, in 2002, Matt Jones coined a new term of Warchalking to describe the markings left to identify WAPs. With the aid of technology, now Warflying is a term that is used to describe the same type of method that Wardriving uses - except that plane is the method of transportation.