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The Low-End Approach To Wireless Hacking

Posted by timothy on from the not-enough-empty-cans-yet dept.

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.

7 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Class? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The guy who played with the wii controllers to create 3D displays and interactive screens, etc. (can't remember where he was from)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

    He's from Carnegie Mellon University.

  2. A bit of history?! by Dekortage · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:A bit of history?! by ACMENEWSLLC · · Score: 5, Informative

      To clarify, the name war dialing did not come from the movie. It was around long before the movie. The movie did a rather nice job of being accurate with how it worked - until the computer just started speaking on it's own later in the movie.

      War dialing turned up interesting results because many locations dropped VT100 onto a POTs line and had no log in authentication. In many cases you would dial up and if you had your emulator set right, you were root.

      With most interested in hacking the Internet, I often wonder if these type of open doors have come back into existence. There are many Ethernet->analog line "out of band" maintenance devices being put in place...

    2. Re:A bit of history?! by Minwee · · Score: 4, Informative

      To clarify, the name war dialing did not come from the movie.

      The _concept_ and _practice_ of "wardialing" was around long before "Wargames". The name was adopted as a reference to the movie.

      Anyone who tells you differently is just trying to promote their book.

  3. Cordless phones... by BJZQ8 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Too much free time... by houghi · · Score: 2, Informative

    One can NEVER have enough beer.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  5. Re:charges? by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, you're wrong, I used the correct word for the intended meaning - "effected," in the sense of to bring something about. My usage becomes a bit clearer to the inattentive when the agent isn't elided:

    And they don't have to stick, either - the arrest can still be effected [by a police officer].

    "Affected" wouldn't make much sense in that sentence frame, or the paragraph as a whole.