Wardriving

July 28th, 2004 - 11:15 | 3 comments

Ben and I were playing with a wireless-enabled PDA yesterday. I had to admit defeat after trying for a long time to connect to my home wireless network. It just wouldn’t log in - I never did figure out why. I then reset all the settings to their original values, but forgot to actually turn off the ‘enable wireless’ option.

Later in the day we were driving around, and as we passed the old folks home I heard a chirp. The PDA had found a wireless network and was wondering whether I wanted to connect! What a nerve! Later we drove past more company buildings and yet more networks were discovered. We could only think that the security was what was stopping my network being accessible, and therefore these networks were completely wide open!

This was my first experience of wardriving. I wanted to connect then go to some porn site just so it turned up in their logs. Didn’t though

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3 Responses to “Wardriving”

1 Ed Jul 28th, 2004 at 2:10 pm

Which one were you trying?
I was semi-seriously considering buying a PDA in the US since all the hotels we were in offered wireless network or (in Vegas) broadband directly to our room.
I’ve heard rumours that some of the PDAs can take external aerials, although there was one that I heard about which was particularly good at picking up wireless networking points even over quite a distance. I’ve forgotten which they were though. :/ Probably one of those linux-able ones.
2 Ben Jul 29th, 2004 at 6:21 pm

It’s my mum’s PDA, a HP iPAQ 4150

I don’t think it’s got a socket for an external aerial, and I’d be surprised if you could get linux onto it, but it is nice…if you’ve got a use for a PDA, that is…!
3 Ed Jul 31st, 2004 at 5:25 pm

Hah, perhaps you need something like this then:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/6447/

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