[HN Gopher] Modern Wardriving (2023)
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Modern Wardriving (2023)
Author : zdw
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-08-23 04:27 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simonroses.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonroses.com)
| bluedino wrote:
| A friend and I used to do this, using the USB GPS reciever from
| Microsoft Streets and Trips, and then an Orinoco PC Card that let
| us use an external antenna that we got from a Linksys home
| AP/router.
|
| It was fun seeing all the networks on the map when we got home. I
| think the original plan was to send out flyers to these
| businesses offering networking/IT services but we never got that
| far (especially to the ones with open networks)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I had a magnetic mount antenna on my car and a marine GPS that
| I used with Netstumbler sometime around 2001. I used an Orinoco
| PC Card adapter, too. I remember the external antenna
| connection was very fiddly and fragile. I would run the rig
| anytime I had a long trip to take. It was fun to see the
| relatively huge number of networks around bigger cities, as
| compared to the sparseness of rural Ohio where I lived.
|
| I still remember a few of the more amusing network names when I
| drive past their locations. I can't ever drive on I-75 south of
| Bowling Green, OH without thinking of "Chickenfeet".
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I had a similar setup that i used while driving cross country
| ~2002. I used to pull into trucker rest areas to borrow wifi.
| I had more than a couple ask me about the magnetic antenna.
| ape4 wrote:
| The rumor is that the Google Maps car does this.
| srmarm wrote:
| This has been a known fact for some time
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...
| dtx1 wrote:
| I don't quite get the point of this. Basically any home or small
| buisness router is going to have a password or it's a public wifi
| hotspot anyway. Am I missing anything?
| asynchronous wrote:
| Back in the day it was a way to capture a lot of handshakes
| from a lot of different WiFi networks, then offline and back
| home crack the passwords and get a growing list of networks you
| could get into.
|
| But all that to say that hackers don't exactly need a reason to
| have a hobby.
| metrix wrote:
| It's not to get into a network, it's just to list where they're
| at.. For points. Similar to internet points :). There's no
| hacking involved just nerds being nerds
|
| What you find shows up here: https://wigle.net/
|
| As you can see there's quite a few people who do it
| niceguy4 wrote:
| Wardriving for sex toys!
|
| https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-
| blog/screwdriving-l...
| sva_ wrote:
| There are definitely ways like deauth all clients, grab hash
| and try to crack it; or evil twin attack.
| teeray wrote:
| Most business wifi passwords are so ridiculously simple they
| could be trivially cracked.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Passwords matter if your goal is to get free wifi. But
| wardriving can also scan for devices ... vulnerable/exploitable
| devices. It is not hard to track down specific vehicles and
| security systems, which are the first steps to all sorts of
| high end property crime.
|
| The uuid for a tesla car's bluetooth is 0xFE96 or 0xFE97. Some
| targeted wardriving easily gives you the general location of
| every tesla in a neighbourhood, and then the phones that unlock
| them. Then you sniff the ssid from the phone, look it up in
| wigle, and you know exactly what car lives in what garage,
| along with where the phone is that can start said car.
| Wardriving isnt all about kids wanting free wifi.
| Brechreiz wrote:
| Why is it called that?
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's a play off of the war dialing phrase where you would have
| your computer dial every phone number within a prefix.
| 212-555-0001, -0002,... -9999. You would log every number that
| was answered by another computer for later investigation.
|
| Classic movie scene based on the concept from War Games:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb1r_uKOew4
| breck wrote:
| In 1895 a young Italian studying Maxwell's equations wondered if
| perhaps you didn't need wires to send an electromagnetic message,
| and after months of tinkering beamed the first radio message
| which rang a bell on the other side of his parent's attic.
|
| The first person he showed this to was his mother, who to her
| credit didn't accuse him of witchcraft but gave him a hug and
| supported him in all his future ventures.
|
| He then went on to start a company building useful things on top
| of this discovery, including the first transatlantic wireless
| radio that saved tens of thousands of lives and is no doubt in
| part responsible for many of you alive reading this today.
|
| Fast forward a century and skip the long hours and blood, sweat,
| and tears of millions of scientists and engineers and technicians
| and factory workers who have further built this technology so
| instead of just sending Morse code wirelessly at a few words per
| minute, we can send all of humanity's information to everyone on
| earth in seconds.
|
| Wifi is one of the most beautiful creations and technological
| storylines in all of history.
|
| Let's keep it open and free and not sully it with ads and
| passwords.
| devilbunny wrote:
| WiFi is wonderful magic, but I'm not giving you the password to
| my private network.
| breck wrote:
| Why not make your community better by having your router also
| broadcast an open public network?
| patrick451 wrote:
| For the same reasons I don't invite the entire neighborhood
| into my kitchen for dinner every night. If people want
| wifi, they can buy it themselves.
| cess11 wrote:
| They might be dissidents that don't want their internet
| traffic associated with their physical identity, which
| makes it quite hard to "buy it themselves" in places
| where cash isn't used or ID cards are commonly
| registered.
| stackghost wrote:
| Because freeloaders and/or malicious actors will abuse my
| generosity
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Freeloaders? Well, yeah: isn't that the whole point?
| We're all freeloaders, in some sense, unless you think
| you've _earned_ the water you drink and the air you
| breathe. By giving back to the Freeloader-available
| Resource Pool (the commons), _you 're_ becoming less of a
| freeloader.
|
| Malicious actors? That relies on there being malicious
| actors _physically near you_ , which isn't necessarily a
| valid assumption. Set up a DMZ, try it, and see.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Your view will change once you see your home IP address
| on the search warrant. And no, i am not going to invite
| the public to share in my vpn too.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| (A) That's not how search warrants work.
|
| (B) Having your computers spuriously seized for a police
| investigation is a risk shared by every computer user,
| but those investigations cost money. They don't _tend_ to
| seize your hardware frivolously, except to intimidate
| (fairly common for security researchers, for some
| reason). If you have a public Wi-Fi network, and there 's
| no reason to believe you're a culprit, they're more
| likely to ask you to keep MAC address logs, or shut down
| the public Wi-Fi network, than assume you dunnit and try
| to prosecute with insufficient evidence. You're at far
| more risk running a Tor exit node than a public Wi-Fi
| network, and most Tor exit nodes _don 't_ get raided by
| the police.
|
| Your neighbours are probably not cybercriminals. It's
| _probably_ okay to be nice to them.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> having your computers spuriously seized for a police
| investigation is a risk shared by every computer user
|
| Not where i live. We have layers of rules specifically
| designed to prevent random actions by police.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's not the street-level police who sign the warrants
| for seizing computer hardware.
|
| Yes, the risk is quite low, but it's a risk shared by any
| occupant of an INTERPOL member state.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Well, I've certainly earned the plumbing system that
| supplies the water to my house, I pay for it and my
| labour indirectly supports the building out of that
| system.
|
| WiFi isn't some sort of aether, it is created.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > unless you think you've earned the water you drink
|
| Earned? WTF logic is that? I pay for the water I drink.
| What in the world are you on about?
| stackghost wrote:
| >Set up a DMZ, try it, and see
|
| No, I don't think I will. I will continue to keep my wifi
| password protected so that randoms can't degrade my
| Internet speed by torrenting movies 24/7, send death
| threats to public officials from my IP address, or engage
| in other unsavory activities.
| inkubus wrote:
| someone can do some bad tnings on internet with help of
| your wifi?
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Marconi always gets credit, but Tesla invented it:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html
| breck wrote:
| No. Your source makes clear that Marconi sent the first
| message (Tesla failed to send a radio message in 1895,
| Marconi succeeded). Read "My Father Marconi" by his daughter
| Degna. Fantastic book.
|
| Other than that, a very fascinating read, the link you
| shared. Patent stuff is silly, but were way less silly back
| then, and had more positive 2nd order effects back then.
|
| It was cool how Tesla and Marconi held each other in high
| regard, and built on each other's works.
| grecy wrote:
| I would genuinely love to offer free use of my wifi to anyone
| that needs it.
|
| 1. My billing is usage based, the bills could be astronomical
|
| 2. Laws around who is at fault are the person paying the bill.
| My IP address doing who knows what could easily land me in
| jail.
|
| Sadly, the cons outweigh the pros
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Free WIFI tragically will fall into the 'tragedy of the
| commons'.
|
| How much a better place the world would be if we could freely
| share ANYTHING without getting abused, sabotaged, taken
| advantage of, taken for granted, getting hate for revoking,
| whatever we offer?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Google productionized this with their Google Maps product. It's
| how they know more about where you are by utilizing WiFi signals.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Indeed, that's how they map the inside of a shopping mall or
| subway stop.
| RedAuburn wrote:
| Instead of using all this fancy hardware just to contribute to a
| proprietary database, i'd recommend uploading to BeaconDB[1]
| using NeoStumbler[2] on your phone.
|
| [1] https://beacondb.net/ [2]
| https://github.com/mjaakko/NeoStumbler
| StrLght wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! I'm going to report a few APs during
| my next bike ride
| spacecadet wrote:
| I operate a combination of mobile and fixed point Pwnagotchis
| across NYC and Brooklyn, I push all the pcaps back to my home
| lab, which operates in a cluster of distributed hash crackers.
| They all utilize GPS for AP mapping as well. Roughly 5,000
| passwords since 2020. Highly recommend the project for anyone
| interested in hardware, wardriving, and a tiny bit of AI.
|
| 99% of passwords a junk, lol. At this point I can probably guess
| them faster, but the project has its moments.
|
| Flipper is ok. HackRF and M5 much much better.
| itissid wrote:
| 1. Of the many problems, one critical issue with using this for
| anything other than security research, is accurate mapping in
| urban dense areas. Essentially, you are constructing a map of Wi-
| Fi->Lat/Long or BLE -> Lat/Long.
|
| I believe google's solution to this is 3D modeling of
| buildings[1] based on research from people like Paul Groves[2].
|
| 2. I think the other issue, not with wardriving but with use of
| such open source infrastructure in general, is launching products
| that could rely on this mapping. It requires a lot of money and
| is a bit of a chicken & egg problem. It's also a privacy concern
| to collect all that Wifi/BLE data for any commercial use.
|
| 3. I was also saddened to know about Mozilla MLS shutting down
| due to f**ng patent trolls[3] that mean that until such
| competition sucking scum is taken down these technologies will
| remain boxed to hobby land, small scale diy-ism and security
| research.
|
| [1] https://insidegnss.com/end-game-for-urban-gnss-googles-
| use-o... [2] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/6850
|
| [3] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/retiring-the-mozilla-
| locatio...
| dosman33 wrote:
| Ah yes, memories of my laptop, an Orinoco card, and Netstumbler
| cruising down the highway during my day-job. Shortly after that I
| added an X-10 video receiver and a USB Hauppauge WinTV adapter to
| capture video transmitters too. I'd reach over and trigger a
| screen-shot whenever live video came into view. Once in a while
| I'd even capture myself driving through a parking lot or
| something on the feed.
| gravitronic wrote:
| War driving with a friend, meeting his lady friend where she
| waited tables at Denny's, and then meeting her roommate is how I
| met my wife
| green-salt wrote:
| Something fun I did in 2015ish was zip tying an Intel compute
| stick, a small usb power brick, and an Alfa usb wifi thing to my
| drone and ran kismet on it in the air and SSHed in from my laptop
| on the ground. Could see quite a lot of APs from above without
| clutter on the ground.
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Netstumbler sound intensifies!
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