WirelessPirate.net » net stumbler

Wardriving Software

Wireless Pirate — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 00:00:00 +0000

This post was inspired by an email from David W (who I can’t reply to for some reason – the email is not getting through). I wanted to have a quick look around the place to see what software is available for stumbling/wardriving/network scanning etc. Here’s what I came up with;

Net Stumbler: The pre-eminent stumbling program for Windows machines, Net(work) Stumbler appears to support a wide variety of wifi cards, presents useful information (including a graph of signal strength over time) and supports GPS input to pinpoint the location of the WAPs you are detecting. I use Net Stumbler with my Netgear WG511 card, on a Sony VAIO laptop, running Windows 2000 and it works excellently (including GPS data now!)
Kismet: As far as I know, Kismet is the favourite *NIX stumbling/scanning tool, and “supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic”
MacStumbler: “MacStumbler is a utility to display information about nearby 802.11b and 802.11g wireless access points”. Apparently works with Apple Airport Card and MacOS 10.1 or greater.

There are heaps more than those ones, but they are the big-boys as far as I can tell. As I mentioned, I use Net Stumbler, because I have a Win2k laptop, and it works with my card. So far, so good! I’d like to hear what other people use and any problems they’ve run into with certain packages?

Powerful, Proximate Network

Wireless Pirate — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved house now, although I haven’t got ym new desktop, so I’m not set up properly. I’m still operating via laptop, but my ADSL isn’t connected at this house, so the wireless modem isn’t much good to me at this point either .

Just out of interest, I turned on my wireless card and loaded up Net Stumbler the other day and have noted that I continuously get a strong signal (60 ish SNR) for another network which must be close. What is really interesting is that if I walk out the back of my house, the signal to my own AP drops off significantly, but the signal to this other network remains constant and strong. I can only guess that they have a powerful antennae on it or something which provides me with a strong connection regardless of the small change in distance/location.

The network is secured (WEP), and is identifying itself as an ‘Agere‘ modem, but that’s about all I know.

How would one go about finding out who’s network this is? I’m interested to know who it belongs to and what sort of a set-up they’ve got.

First Stumble With GPS!

Wireless Pirate — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just been on a short stumble/war-drive with my GPS unit for the first time, and here’s the results (using my standard format).

7 different SSIDs scanned
11 unique MAC-addressed nodes scanned
4 WAPs encrypted with WEP [36%]
3 WAPs using what appear to be default SSIDs [27%]

I’ve also included the actual Net Stumbler log (exported as wi-scan, with extensions [summary format]) for interest, which includes the co-ordinates of each point. At the moment I can’t map anything, so I can’t do a lot with the data, but it’s there if anyone else can do something with it