Slashdot Mirror
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."
What I find pretty amazing is the 500+ people with the default SSID. It's like my apartment complex...if I'm not careful, I can get on one of three different networks and not know it!
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
"Hackerish SSID (h3lpm3) 15 (0.7%)"
/. readers' SSIDs are in that netstumbler log, and I wonder how many are afraid to reply and say so since their GPS coords are associatated to their SSID.
Hey thats my SSID!
All kidding aside, I wonder how many
Woah, nice to have a map of all the access points, for those times when I'm without internet connection ... or don't want to use my own :D Thank god for wireless!
I'm not drunk, I'm just in touch with pi.
In East LA, a pilot is "warflying" when averting the numerous bullets flying into the air, shot by drunk cholos on July 4th. Talk about bombs bursting in air.
And I can hear it already - hey ese, you forgot to encrypt your airport station, homes!
Namaste
I had a similar, but lower tech, experience just yesterday. On a bus ride through Seattle I flipped open a standard laptop with a Cisco wifi card, and found dozens of access points. Most of them where open. I wonder how long it will be until wireless companies start offering security out of the box? How hard would it be to have a wireless access point that shipped with a random password and instructions on how to use it? It's pretty obvious that the average person doesn't realize what the risks are. I know because as a desktop support tech I get asked about this all the time. As soon as I start talking about things like WEP and MAC addresses, I see eyes glazing over.
http://slushdot.org/mirror/warfly/warflying.php
Coming slowly but surely!
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
Mirror
You can boost the signal strength of the Linksys WRT54G with this "undocumented feature". Basically it's a back door will let you up the transmission strength to the maximum output. Find details at this thread: WRT54G Increased transmission strength. People's comments there indicate pretty good results.
Check out great deal on electronics and computer at Retail Retreat. Do your Christmas shopping online!
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...