Mapping insecure wireless access
Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog reports that the Worldwide Wardrive, an effort to create a statistical analysis of how many access points are currently deployed, where and how they are protected (or not) from unwanted access, is underway through November 2nd. The goal is not to break into networks, but to educate network owners about their security shortcomings and, generally, to get an idea about how many hot spots there are around the world. Should be interesting to watch.
The areas covered and who is doing research are listed here.
Interesting chart here, for example, that describes the total number of access points found to date, how many are WEP (encryption) enabled, how many were using their default SSID (network name) and distribution of most common network names chosen as an alternative to the default SSID -- one supposes the top choices were "wireless network" or "wireless."
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 29, 2002 04:53 PM | TrackBack