Wireless networks in a geographical area can be identified and mapped using wardriving techniques. In this video, you’ll see the results of these wardriving efforts and how other techniques can be used to gather intelligence about local wireless networks.
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You may not realize it, but people who are driving down the street could be gathering information about your network. This is called wardriving, where you have a Wi-Fi monitoring system, a GPS, and you’re using some type of system to get around and gather information about all of the wireless networks that are out there in the world.
Since you’re in a vehicle, you can gather a lot of information across a very large area in a relatively short period of time. You can passively begin monitoring what wireless networks may be between home and work, and you can examine those results to see exactly what networks may be out there. There are plenty of ways to gather this information for free.
There are utilities that you can download and put onto a laptop or a mobile device. And a lot of this information can be consolidated in centralized databases. A good example of this would be the one at Wigle– w, i, g, l, e dot net. And of course, people have extended wardriving by putting monitoring systems on bicycles or even on drones that can fly over very large areas.
Here’s the results wardriving. You can find this at wigle.net– w, i, g, l, e dot net. And they have consolidated all of these wardriving efforts into a set of Google Maps. And you can see very clearly exactly where all the wireless networks might be in your geographical area.