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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.
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...