Canadian police have had their first experience of war driving - cruising around looking for open wireless networks so you can go online. And it was bizarre, not to say seriously sick, in the extreme.

Pete Shipley - who created the first automated network security scanner (NetSweep) in the mid-80s - originally came up with the term and the guys over at wardriving.com say these are the bones of a decent war-driving set up:

Laptop Computer - At least a pentium 100 with a free PCMCIA slot and serial port for GPS.802.11b-compliant wireless ethernet cardThe Software, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, everyone is supported.Optional: GPS receiver for location tracking. A way to get around, a car, bus, subway, walking, bike.

Here’s a clip from Britain’s The Register. By Kevin Poulsen, it’s from 2001 but …

"… Peter Shipley reaches up though the sunroof of his car and slaps a dorsal-shaped Lucent antenna to the roof - where it’s held firm by a heavy magnet epoxied to the base. ‘The important part of getting this to work is having the external antenna. It makes all the difference,’ says Shipley, snaking a cable into the car and plugging it into the wireless network card slotted into his laptop. The computer is already connected to a GPS receiver - with its own mag-mount roof antenna - and the whole apparatus is drawing juice through an octopus of cigarette-lighter adapters. He starts some custom software on the laptop, starts the car and rolls out."

Remembering this article is from a couple of year back, Poulsen says Shipley is demonstrating the next big thing in hacking and, "The moment Shipley pulls out of the parking garage, the laptop displays the name of a wireless network operating within one of the anonymous downtown office buildings: ‘SOMA AirNet.’ Shipley’s custom software passively logs the latitude and longitude, the signal strength, the network name and other vital stats. Seconds later another network appears, then another: ‘addwater,’ ‘wilson,’ ‘tangentfund.’

"After fifteen minutes, Shipley’s black Saturn has crawled through twelve blocks of rush hour traffic, and his jerry-rigged wireless hacking setup has discovered seventeen networks beaconing their location to the world. After an hour, the number is close to eighty. ‘These companies probably spend thousands of dollars on firewalls, says Shipley. And they’re wide open’."

About a year later, when Winn Schwarta’s then 11-year-old son first wired up his war-driving computer, "he was amazed - and frankly so was I," Schwarta wrote in Network World here. "Sitting in the car in our driveway, we instantly found two home-based wireless networks; neither of them secure. We drove into town and found more than 70 networks, about one-third of them using WEP, the others hanging naked in the breeze."

‘Naked’ takes us back to Canada - Toronto, Ontario, to be precise - where, says a CP report in the London Free Press here, a police officer spotted a motorist going the wrong way down a one-way street in a residential neighbourhood.

Pulling him over, "Sgt. Don Woods discovered the man was naked from the waist down as he downloaded images on a laptop computer of a young girl involved in a sex act with an adult.

"Investigation showed the man had hooked into a wireless computer network at a nearby house to gain access to a resident’s Internet connection and download images from child pornography websites."

The story quotes Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie as saying, "We have never laid a (war driving-related) charge before, and I’m not aware of any similar charges being laid in Canada."

Gillespie said detectives from the child exploitation section made arrangements with the OPP to search the suspect’s home in Southwestern Ontario and, "We seized 10 computers … and hundreds of CDs and floppy disks."

"Right now, I would say we are looking at hundreds of thousands of images."

Walter Nowakowski, 36, of Delhi, Ontario, was subsequently c harged with possession of child pornography, accessing child pornography, distributing child pornography, making child pornography and theft of telecommunications.

Like we said - seriously sick.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2003 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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