[vox-tech] Re: sniffing wireless packets / war driving

[Charles McLaughlin]

Sorry.... I thought that I noticed a basestation in infastructure mode.
It was actually in ad-hoc mode, so maybe it is just someone else's laptop
and not a basestation.

Charles


On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Charles McLaughlin wrote:

> Ok... I know what your thinking.  No, I'm not trying to crack someone's
> WLAN.  I just moved and am just curious if any WLANs are near by.  At my
> old apartment complex, I was able to use my neighbor's DSL connection from
> his wireless basestation.  He didn't even enable WEP, so I couldn't help
> but use his signal -- my laptop automatically recieved an IP address from
> his basestation!
>
> Now... I've moved and am just curious what signals are out there.  I'm
> using Kismet to sniff wireless packets.  I guess this is legal because I
> haven't actually "circumvented" any encrypted packets. ;-)
>
> Using Kismet,  I can see an infastructure type signal, which I assume is
> a neighbor's WLAN basestation.  I've let Kismet run for two days
> and have sniffed almost 80,000 packets, but none of them have been encrypted.
> When I look at the WLAN using a Winbloze box, I'm asked for a WEP key.
>
> My conclusion is that my neighbor's basestation is using WEP, but
> s/he hasn't booted any wireless clients in the past two days.  Maybe that
> is why none of the packets are encrypted?
>
> Maybe I should mention that I don't know much about networking "theory" --
> I'm more of a hands-on type of guy, so I hope this post makes sense.
>
>
> Thanks for any insight,
> Charles
>
>