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The Low-End Approach To Wireless Hacking
Adrian writes "Zack Anderson, an MIT student, created a solution to wardriving on a budget: warcarting. The Warcart is a shopping cart retrofitted with just about every sort of wireless sniffing device available. It has pivoting antennas and a smoke grenade launcher. It can even dispense infected USB flash drives. It's part of a talk about subway fare-collection-system vulnerabilities that will be given at Defcon 16 in a few days." "Mostly as a joke," says the site — but only mostly.
That this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse?
or does it have a really long extension cord?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I thought that MIT students would want to demonstrate a little more class. War dialing/driving has been around forever. The concept is old school. I am sorry but I feel that there must be projects from MIT students that are more /. worthy that this. I would rather see some medical innovation or manufacturing robotics/theory write up.
We realized that Skynet started, not with an evil corporation or secret government project, but with a wise-ass MIT student and a shopping cart.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm gonna start a pool on how long it takes before the guy using this gets 'detained' or otherwise harassed by the gov't for looking suspicious. I give it a month.
next up "warboating" the permanent search for a river, canal, lock or fjord. Or even pond.
pffft. an exercise in pointlessness - but strangely appealing to my inner geek.
Hate to be the first one to tell you that you are not first, but... ha ha!
A shopping cart loaded down with monitoring and recording equipment?
That's cool. Some tool pushing it around, broadcasting music, and pretending private property is public? That's rather obnoxious.
The operator seems to be the only difference between an interesting application of technology and some douche nozzle who wants his fifteen minutes of fame by trying to coax people into a conflict just so he can "make a point".
If I only had a moose...
Pushing a Trolley with intent?
He might try to make a run for it, That's a cop chase I'd like to see on TV....
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
... and too much beer. :P (and this is a smart one)
College kids
Warboating has already been done:
http://www.panbo.com/archives/2004/04/boats_wifi_warboating.html
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I really want one, so what is the first step . . . Oh Yeah, Steal a shopping cart ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Only from MIT would something so stupid get so much attention.
FTA: To understand the Warcart requires one understand a bit of history first. Wardriving, that is, driving with a laptop computer and tracking WiFi access points, first became popular around 2001.
Well, if we're going to talk about history, how about wardialing in the 1980s, clearly the precursor to wardriving. The name goes back to the movie Wargames, in which the main character writes a program to find compuers by dialing phone numbers in sequence -- so the first wardialers were called "WarGames Dialers".
As I recall, we could wardial thousands of phone numbers in a night and net several dozen modems... boy, that was awhile ago. Get off my lawn!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Interior lights add to the intimidation factor of the Warcart.
Yes. Yes, they certainly do.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I am almost certain that trying to enter or get close to any subway, airport, train station or even walking around in the street will get whoever is pushing the cart shot.
It really isn't very useful without a GPS Unit. How else would they map out their new Findings ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I reminded of the Drupal module Ubercart. Particularly since the strapline of the Ubercart project is One cart to rule them all. Or in this case, One cart to pwn them all.
All kidding aside, war-whatever has gotten people's attention. I live in a cubicle-style neighborhood, you know, houses built on top of each other. I have a powerful Wi-Fi antennae and can "see" a dozen Wi-Fi points. When I first moved in, more than half were unsecured, default SSID, default password. Now only 2 are unsecured. Even the layperson has caught on and I believe this is in part of the war driving/flying/carting craze that went on.
I started looking at the comments before watching the video and every other one was putting this guy down and calling him a douche-$(insertwordhere). After watching the video, it appears that half of Slashdot has no appreciation for feeding the inner geek, and is just pissed off that this guy had live females stop and actually talk to him.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
So, did he get the cart for his Warcart from Walmart?
3:45 - Skycart creator scores with "real" female geek. *nawcom saves for fap material*
3:54 - Camera person seems to have a different preference... uggh. *nawcom loses hard-on*
4:25 - Proof that the camera person has a day shift at some store as security where the owner is racist; The owner "rings the bell" in the back room every time a person of african heritage walks in.
7:48 - Steve Dompier from 1970s must of created a time machine with the Altair 8800 and come to the 21 century.
Okay enough reviewing for now. My only fix I would suggest is to make everything a little more stable on the shopping cart, since everything shakes about. Though it is just a shopping cart.
*nawcom gives his review score of 9.3627 out of 10 IVs*
At any given moment, you're breaking some law. Disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, etc. etc. Charges are easy to make up. And they don't have to stick, either - the arrest can still be effected. Then there's either some resisting arrest or an accident that results in the cart getting tipped over and all the equipment breaking.
Oh, gee, an MIT student engaging in high-tech masturbation? Never would have guessed it....
At the height of the CB craze, and while on a mandatory separation from my car, I mounted a CB on a 10-speed, including a 1/4 wave stainless steel whip antenna. With a spring. I don't remember why. I learned a lot of practical physics with that rig. Newtons laws of motion, angular momentum, all kinds of things when taking a corner with that damn antenna waving around. Also a lot about weight of batteries. The shine will come off this Warcart rather fast.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Good. While you're doing it,
loan me a gun. Two guns.
You'd use these weapons against men
and women who uphold the law?
We use these weapons
to shop for groceries, ****.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
That thing is pretty fuckin rad...he shoulda called it t3h z0rcart
Most cordless phones are now digital 900 or 2400MHz. Unless you can decode that stuff on the fly, all you're going to hear is scratchy noise.
I concur with some fellow above who noted that we must be losing touch with our inner geek. Even if thing is riddled with illegal shit and the guy who created it is kind of an idiot, cheers to him for indulging himself.
;p
Then again, this comes from a guy who spends ALL of his spare time making wireless thin clients out of old laptops for mounting in picture frames and other surfaces in his house. Gotta get on that solar power next, this shit is getting expensive.
The point, to hell with all you nay-sayers. Go back to whatever boring, gainfully-employed thing is is that you are doing while the rest of us have fun.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
This is low-end wireless.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
A passer by asks the student whether or not he's getting paid. The student should have replied with the following statement:
"I'm providing a public service asshat. This is a communications "finding" device I built into a shopping cart. A shopping cart! Do you really think that your privacy is anything more than illusion? Think about that the next time you see any government vehicle pass by. Now get your fanny pack off of my modem before I pop an infected USB flash drive in your ass."
The WarHoveround or how about the WarSegway? I found the video to be quite amusing, especially the v.90 handshake audio clip.
I would rate this hack as "made to impress the /. crowd". I would also doubt that the /. crowd would care for it if the creator wasn't wearing a MIT tshirt.
I have a bag lady with a shopping cart just like that that's living near my house...
I should really change the password to my wireless network....
Noooo!! I dont wanna go in the cart!
This isn't smart. It's not novel. Its hardly worth a talk at Defcon. The "rationale" seems to be almost an afterthought or perhaps a brainfart one might have while waiting at the MacDonalds drive through for a burger and a coke.
In 2001 I made a box with a friend consisting of a laptop with busted monitor, 200mW SENAO 802.11card, USB drive with data, GPS with custom power supply and a magnet mounted omnidirectional antenna. Total cost was about $200AUD (most in the WiFi Card). We put it in a delivery truck for a few weeks and let it triangulate and do basic probes on its own (subnet sniffing, wepcrack, DHCP attempts, default passwords). We could download he data by just driving next to the office. The box would identify the "home" station and automatically RSYNC the data to a server there. Lots of fun times with that rig! We got some security auditing contracts out of it to boot!
Anyway, enough blowing my own horn. For the sake of putting this dude in his place, I hope the contrast is clear. BTW, I didn't go to a prestigious University. I went to the University of Wollongong? Heard of it? Probably not. But I bet I know more about Wifi and hacking than this douche bag. Maybe the eggs on my face for not submitting it to Defcon? Or maybe he got bonus points because he's from MIT? (And who let that happen btw?? Wheres the _real_ researchers?)
Or am I being paranoid?
... the obligatory three coats one must wear while pushing this thing down the street.
Have gnu, will travel.
How long before this is made into a video game?
What about sharks with lasers?
we need defence on these systems because terrorists are attacking out imagination!
Walmart wants their shopping cart back...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
While this is an interesting concept, just looking like a shoddily made piece of equipment does not make it a budget machine. All this equipment costs a great deal of money (not to mention the waterjetted parts which cost at least $10/5min, around at least $200 for what they have there). Two(!) high end laptops, all the lighting - just because you can steal it from school or have your parents pay for it doesn't make it free.
Much more impressive would be a system built from a cheap computing source, scaled to fit in a backpack or other unobtrusive object that would allow for portable warwalking - I don't see any advantage this cart has over wardriving, not even cost.
Someone has been watching the Italian Job too many times.
I stopped reading there. While it might strike the geeks as a potential gut-buster, to me it's just insane to put anything that launches smoke bombs on a wheeled contraption you intend to use in public. Remember what happened to those marketing people in Boston last year when they caused Authority-Figure-Panic by sticking little boxes with flashing lights on them all over the place?
And mostly harmless.
I guess they spend all the money in electronics, and couldn't afford some pneumatic wheels, jeez
They're on the back - duh
Wow, I'm surprised this hasn't been done before as much.
Googleing
"and from this * came the * of all *" -groove
Only came up with this, someone who couldn't spell "groove", and something unrelated.
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
I don't think it affected him much, though we did have an American chap round earlier asking if we knew anything about 40 million stolen Credit Card details....
So does this mostly only come out at night ? Mostly...
There you go, cued it up perfectly for the obligitory follow up "nuke it from orbit" post
Also on Digg
Step 6: Invent Time Travel.
Step 7: GOTO Step 1.
that thing says only one thing. "Please, please, I spent all my money on all this cool stuff but in the process I lost my house, my car, my wife left me and my dog has gone missing. As you can see I must be doing something illegal so please PLEASE arrest me so I can get a bed and three meals a day".
Step 7: GOTO Step 1.
You know, there are these guys in California looking for people like you...
Forget worrying about the police, how about local street kids? You're probably ok wheeling it around the university campus and in the nice middle class streets nearby but a trolley full of expensive very disposable electronics in some neighbourhoods is going to get you some unwanted attention from people looking to make a quick buck.
yes yes I know it's just a bit of college student fun and not to be taken seriously... just somebody warn the kid eh?
Anyway, enough blowing my own horn.
Judging by your attitude, I suspect you spend more time blowing the horns of others.