War driving for WLAN security

By John Cox

June 17, 2004 12:00 PM ET

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Network World - The 4th Annual WorldWide WarDrive (WWWD) is under way this week, with volunteers scanning the airwaves in a neighborhood near you for wireless LAN access points.

This year's WLAN discovery effort began June 12 and runs through June 19.

The WWWD is organized by a mixed group of security professionals and hobbyists who cruise areas to document the location of access points and how many of them have even minimal security. The goal is to boost awareness of the need to secure residential and corporate WLANs.

So far, the results seem to be almost as disquieting this year as in past years.

The WWWD and other surveys have repeatedly found a heavy majority of access points with no security features at all. Many of these devices use the default service set identifier determined by the manufacturer, often as simple as the vendor's name, broadcast the SSID so that any interested client can hear it and connect, and don't use the basic Wired Equivalent Privacy encryption protocol.

WWWD4 thus far has identified nearly 200,000 networks. You can find a partial summary of statistics online. Of the 200,000 networks, 34% have WEP active. In 2003, the war drivers identified 88,122 networks, of which 32% had WEP active.

A clickable map lets you zoom in to specific access points and identify their SSID if available.

More information is available at the WWWD Web site.

Reprinted with permission from

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Story copyright 2009 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.

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