Dale's Weblog

Wardriving...without the driving.

Today after the movies, Matthew and Stuart came back to my place. We decided to go searching for wireless networks in the area with my new ibook. Personally I didn’t think we’d find any, but I was interested to see.

I downloaded a program called Macstumbler, like netstumbler but for mac. I like it because it continuously searches for wireless networks.

Anyway at the bottom of my street up popped a wireless network with the SSID ‘workgroup’ and no encryption turned on. Interesting. So I joined the network. I got an ip address of 192.168.0.3. So I tried typing google into my browser, didn’t work. I went to the address 192.168.0.1 and up popped a netgear password logging page. Anyway I tried the username: admin and the password: password. It worked. Scary. I had access to their wireless router. Anyway I disconnected and we continued walking.

During that time we found about 25 wireless access points. About 10 of which had no encryption, 5 of which the internet worked on (just tested doing a ping to ii.net and going to google.com), and 2 which the access point password was not changed. Most of the access points we found were running on netgear stuff.

I was really surprised to find so many networks and ones where there was no encryption.

We couldn’t pin point the houses where the wireless was coming from although I know the general idea.

I’m going to type up a thing about wireless security and do a letter box drop in the area. It was really scary!!

Anyway it was fun, we didn’t download anything just checked to see if google.com worked. Although now I know where to check my email if iinet goes down :p

Interesting Stuff.