Back in the old days before everyone had broadband internet access, modems were the standard way of accessing other computers and consequently other networks. In order to connect to another computer, you first had to know what phone number to call. People would often run programs that would call huge amounts of phone numbers in an attempt to find computers that they could connect to. Often times people would find dial-in phone numbers to corporate, school, or other networks that they probably shouldn't have access to.

With the advent of the Internet, a similar activity has been born. Scanning. On the Internet, an IP address is analogous to a phone number. People often scan through large amounts of IP addresses looking for computers that are running certain types of servers.

The new wireless age has introduced a new brute force attack. War driving is when crackers (or harmless interested parties :-)) drive around in a car equipped with wireless gear looking for illicit access to unsecured wireless networks. Recently TheRegister had [http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/17976.html an article] about War driving.

There are some tools to facilitate finding AccessPoint's.

Wellenreiter is a gtkperl program that makes the discovery and the audit of 802.11b wireless-networks much easier.It has an embedded statistic engine for the common parameters provided by the wireless drivers which enables you to fetch the detail about the consistency and signal strength etc of the network. For discover accesspoints / networks / ad-hoc cards, Wellenreiter got an amazing easy scanner window. It searches for any accesspoint in the range of the scanning device. It detects and differs essid boradcasting or non-broadcasting wireless networks in every channel,doing frequency switching automaticly. The manufactor is detected by the devices MAC-Address. WEP detection is also implemented and Wellenreiter detects and differs wherever the beacon broadcasting machine is an true accesspoint or an AD-Hoc mode station.

There are also some tools available to help you subvert the security of an AccessPoint (or more acurately audit the security of your own AccessPoint ... right?). These should be refactored into another page.


[CategorySoftware]