Warchalking is a term that describes the act of walking around with a laptop, picking up locations of wireless access points, and drawing symbols to mark various information about the wireless access points. The term was coined in London of June of 2002 by Matt Jones
and a group of friends who used hobo-inspired symbols with chalk to mark various attributes to the wireless access points they encountered. He later posted the symbols on his blog and they became well known. The symbols - seen below each represent different descriptions of these WAPs.
The first symbol, on the left, represents an open Wireless Access Point. Anyone
(Somehow this post got cut off. I will have to re-write the rest)
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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.
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GirlGeekteete dotNet Tags: DFECON, Wardriving, Warchalking, Warflying, Wardialing, Matt Jones, Wifi, GPS
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