What exactly is a \’WarDriver\’? WarDriver: One who locates and logs wireless access points while in motion ;[benign]. WarDriving was invented by Peter Shipley and now commonly practiced by hobbyists, hackers and security analysts worldwide. More information about this trend can be found at wardriving.com. Even if you are not into this sport, the following (innocent) software may be of use to obtain information about your wireless network. In a next message I\’ll discuss a few less innocent software tools. Probably the most popular network scanner for Mac OSX is MacStumbler. It detects nearby wireless networks, tells you the channels they use, whether they use WEP (encryption), give their signal (and noise) strength, the name of the network and if you click on the Details button it gives you (among other things) the MAC-address. A similar tool is iStumbler. It gives roughly the same information : SSID (name). MAC-address, signal/noise, channel and whether it is encrypted. More information is available from the iStumbler manual. In addition it presents a signal graph which is useful if you are trying to decide on which signal you will let your Airport-basestation broadcast. Using iStumbler i discovered that there was a recurrent noise at channel 5 every couple of minutes (don\’t ask what it was) but that on channel 1 the signal was not interrupted.

Both MacStumbler and iStumbler are active scanners meaning that they send out probe request to nearby access points. As a result they are not able to detect closed networks. To detect them you need far more intrusive passive scanning software, but that is for next time.

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1 comment
Posted in mac
Written on Tue, 06 January 2004 at 3:29 pm
Tags: mac, OSX, warwalking
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