The Helpful Hacker

update 2009-12-03 – I’ve gotten some attention over this little project, including some time on a local radio station!

One Third Of Wireless Networks Are Exposed To Intrusion

Press Release

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“Project Gobox” has me testing some gps and wifi equipment, specifically the “Black Intellinet Wireless G USB Adapter 503457″ and the “Pharos IGPS-500 GPS Receiver”.  So far I couldn’t be happier with the performance.  For about $30 each, its a good deal.  Build quality seems decent.

In the future I will be putting these devices through their paces, but for now some informal testing (i.e. fun).

In about 40 minutes I collected hundreds of gps/wifi data points using kismet.

So data in hand i had a sinking feeling… Great I have hundreds of data points, what do I *do* with them?

The answer is “gpsmap”, a nifty little app bundled with kismet that has tons of mapping options.

Quick searching revealed an excellent post from the California Soil Research Lab (of all places) that got me started on my way.  While I haven’t had much time to tweak the parameters, I have already impressed my geek friends and shocked the less geeky ones when I explain “green = unsecured wireless”.

Here are the commands I found useful:

#interpolated power map
 gpsmap -S 2 -e -n 1 -t -l ssid  -k -p -Q 20 -q 2 -P 30 -z 2 -d 1000,1000 \
 -o map1.png Kismet-Sep-03-2006-1.gps
 #range map
 gpsmap -e -n 1 -t -l ssid  -k -r -R 15 -q 2 -d 1000,1000 \
 -o map1.png Kismet-Sep-03-2006-1.gps

So here is what I came up with after 40 minutes of driving and about 10 mintues messing around with gpsmap

Additional:

Google Map

It’s scary how much information you can gather with very little work

This wifi survey was a very spur-of-the-moment thing with very little planning or effort.  It makes me really wonder what can be gathered with some additional foresight and planning.  Any “wardriving” stories you’d like to share?