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Warflying 2013 Access Points in Los Angeles

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-just-crazy dept.

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."

4 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. 2013 access points... by foxtrot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...is nothing; it's really kinda cool that there are that many.

    1430 of them being unsecured, that bothers the heck out of me.

    -JDF

    1. Re:2013 access points... by gnuadam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just because it doesn't have wep doesn't quite mean that they're unsecured. I don't use wep, but I only allow designated mac addresses onto my network, and make sure that any traffic I care about is either encrypted at the protocol level, or is ssh-tunneled to a wired machine. I trust ssl much more than wep.

      --
      You say :wq, I say ZZ. Why can't we all just get along?
  2. No WEP != No security by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just because a system does not use WEP does not mean it is insecure.

    I've been playing with a WAP - my intention is to firewall it to the point that the only things you can do are DNS, DHCP, VPN, and accessing a password-protected HTTP proxy with bandwidth throttling.

    The only thing WEP would do in such a case is prevent somebody from sniffing the proxy's password from the air, and if I cared I would just move the proxy over to HTTPS.

    Just as WEP != secure, !WEP != !secure.

    So all the "OMFG! 73% of all the APs we sniffed weren't using WEP, therefore 73% of all APs aren't secured" is somewhat flawed reasoning.

    Granted, it is likely pretty close to the truth. But it is not guaranteed to be the truth.

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
  3. Re:WEP + MAC filtering by pclminion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Right, like a person capable of cracking WEP isn't going to know how to sniff a valid MAC and reset the MAC on his own card...

    MAC locking is only secure against very casual intrusion. Most cards (all?) can be re-flashed with a new MAC.