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Warflying 2013 Access Points in Los Angeles
Kallahar writes "We went warflying over Los Angeles and Orange counties yesterday. Flying in a small plane at 1400 feet we detected 2013 802.11b APs in 75 minutes, 71% had no WEP encryption. A map and some pretty pictures are up at my writeup."
On December 10, 2003 we went out Warflying over Los Angeles and Orange counties. Not5150 was the pilot of the 4-seater beechcraft and Kallahar was the laptop/gps/antenna operator. In a 75 minute flight from Pomona to Los Angeles to Santa Monica to Long Beach to Orange and back to Pomona, 2013 access points were found.
The antenna was a mere Orinoco Omnidirectional Range Extender which was hand held. Unfortunately, the GPS didn't work for the first 20 minutes, and the wireless card crashed (had to reboot) while we were over long beach (took 7 minutes).
Equipment
Laptop Compaq Presario 2190US (2.4Ghz Celeron)
802.11b card Orinoco Silver
Antenna Orinoco 2-3dBi Omni
GPS Magellan Meridian
Software NetStumbler on Win2k
Flight Time: 1 hour 15 minutes @ 1400ft
(699x446 - 134k)
Statistics
Total APs 2013
No Encryption 1441 (71.6%)
WEP Encryption 572 (28.4%)
Default SSID 513 (24.5%)
Hackerish SSID
(h3lpm3) 15 (0.7%)
Informational SSID
(southcoastcircuits) 23 (1.1%)
Someone's Name 110 (5.5%)
NetStumbler Files
WarFlying (1.0MB)
The drive home (168k)
(for reference purposes)
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
http://slushdot.org/mirror/warfly/warflying.php
Coming slowly but surely!
Well, he was using a more sensitive handheld antenna, but also consider there was almost no interference between him and those access points, no walls, trees, etc - just a roof and clear sunny skies in most cases.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
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Air to ground doesn't have anything to block the radio waves. You get really good range.
Same thing across open water. Although you get less range than in the air.
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1. He was flying in a plane over LA. -For simplicity's sake when flying under Class B Airspace, many pilots on VFR flights tend to stick to flying over interstates - its easy and keeps you out of trouble.
2. He had a laptop with only one 802.11 card and only one antenna for reception. The necessarily rules out any radio direction finding for accurate plotting of the access points. Instead what you see is what he picked up as he flew and the exact lat / long the plane was at at the time of the signal hit. If he could do some RDF by maybe having antennas in an array attached to the plane at say the wingtips he could with the right software plot out where each possible transmitter was. But he would need to know what altitude the plane was at, what the heading was and the different signal strengths received at each antenna as well as the distance between the antennas in his array. I don't know of any software out there that does this but the information to do this is readily available.
If he had that setup you would see a map with the projected location of each access point arrayed around the path of the aircraft.
Hmmm...