[Courses] [Security] Patriot & war driving (was: Nmap...)

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

Quoth coldfire (Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 07:42:06PM -0500):
> yeah, the patriot BS is old news ... there's some new legislation that's
> been passed in addition to the patriot.  it makes activities such as war
> driving illegal i believe ... :(
 
	For the newbies: war driving is a relatively recent phenomenon,
since wireless networks started getting popular.  Since most people that
install a wireless LAN don't bother to (or can't) dampen the signal
enough that you can't access it outside their building, it's easy to
steal bandwidth.  All you have to do is get a laptop with a wireless
card, install Aerosniff (like a packet sniffer, but for wireless
rather than for Ethernet), and literally drive around town looking for
areas with wireless traffic.  Once you find one, it's generally trivial
to steal their bandwidth.  Hence, war driving.

	(Disclaimer: Don't do this.  At the very least, it will make you
some un-friends.)

	Wireless networks have some serious security problems.  Not only
is it hard to limit the physical areas that can connect to your wireless
network with precision, it's easy to sniff, the access control that you
can implement on one is easily bypassed, and the encryption in common
usage is laughable.  Unless you're running IPSec over it with access
control on the upstream router or something, I wouldn't trust one.  

Cheers,
Raven

"Sed, sed, awk.  Like duck, duck, goose.  Sync, sync, halt.  It's the
 order of nature."
  -- me, after too long a day at work