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June 30, 2004 (Computerworld) -- I admit it: I'm a war driver. Cloaked in anonymity, I cruise the alleyways and byways of corporate America, lurking, searching, probing for a weakness.
There! The telltale tone in my earphones alerts me to a potential target. I quickly glance at my laptop in the passenger seat. No encryption on this wireless network. It's wide open.
I have the tools. I have the knowledge. Seizing the opportunity, I ... do nothing.
Just move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
To go further and actually connect to the wireless network I've found would violate the cardinal rule of war drivers: Thou shall not access another's network under any circumstances.
"Don't do it," says war-driving guru Chris Hurley. Regardless of your motivation -- to experiment, to prove a point, to show an admin his network is unsecure -- "you're committing a crime," he says.
Hurley, a.k.a. Roamer in the war-driving world, is the organizer of the WorldWide WarDrive (WWWD), a project in which volunteers armed with wireless-network-detection software and GPS receivers map all the networks they can find in a week. The war drivers compile statistics that reveal where the networks are and whether or not they are using basic encryption methods. They are trying to prove a point: Wireless network managers need to take security more seriously.
This year's event, WWWD No. 4, ended June 19 after locating 228,537 access points (AP). Of those, about 38% had basic encryption, such as Wired-Equivalent Protocol (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Last year's WWWD found 88,122 APs, of which 32% had encryption. Complete stats are available online.
Hurley is encouraged by the increase in the percentage of encrypted networks, but he was looking for more. "I was kind of hoping for a better increase, up to 40%," he says, but adds, "As long as there is an increase, you're happy."
Hurley, an information security engineer working in the Washington area, became interested in war driving after Peter Shipley reported on his fledgling war-driving efforts at the Def Con security conference several years ago. Since then, Hurley has taken over the annual Def Con war-driving events and the WWWD in an effort to publicize the vulnerabilities of wireless networks.
He points out in his book, WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend, A Guide to Wireless Security, that hackers can easily take war driving a few steps further and use freely available tools to connect to an unencrypted network for free Internet access or to sniff out passwords for complete access.
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