Wardriving in and around Nijmegen
In 2005
Cees-Bart Breunesse and
Martijn Oostdijk
did some wardriving
in and around the city of
Nijmegen.
We will write up our adventures in more detail here soon;
for now here are just some links and pictures.
Hardware
- We bought ourselves some goodies at the
Wi-Fi Shop. Notably: a 12 dBi
flatpannel antenna (the directional antennas were too big and clumsy to
use in a Cees's Volvo) and a 100mW output
Senao long-distance PCCard
based on the Prism chipset.
(The card broke down just after we gave our demo to the Gelderlander
journalists; Wi-Fi Shop sent us a new one.)
- We used a Dell X300
with a 12V car power adapter.
- We borrowed (and never gave back)
Flavio's GPS gadget.
Software
- We managed to get all of the above hardware working under
our operating system of choice:
Linux.
It was necessary to download the
linux-wlan
package to get the Senao card to work.
- Kismet:
to detect the Access Points (APs).
- GPSDrive:
to keep track of the Volvo's location.
- MySQL
and
Festival:
used by Kismet and GPSDrive for enhanced user experience,
although the little voice gets very annoying after a while.
- Ettercap:
to gather some interesting information once we're connected
to an open AP.
- Aircrack:
to experiment with WEP protected APs.
Results
Below are some cool pictures, produced by the gpsmap tool
which comes with Kismet. (Note that the SSIDs are too numerous
to be printed at the correct position.)
 |
 |
 |
| Nijmegen - Elst |
Nijmegen |
Hatert |
We initially wanted to systematically map all of Nijmegen, but Hatert
alone took us one afternoon. So we restricted ourselves to the main
streets and the city center part.
Nijmegen city hall
(the old building, near the Burchtstraat) also had an
open network with SSID stadhuis
(WEP protection off, SSID broadcast on).
We checked it out and discovered a network of many many Windows
machines (and one Sun) behind this AP. Here's an
article in regional newspaper the Gelderlander
about what we found. Yes, it's in Dutch. The article is also
available
locally
from Bart's
press contacts page.
Of course we informed the responsible people and the AP is gone now.
Our conclusion (2005): about half of the APs are open.
Soon we will upload our data to
wardrivemap.nl.
Update: In August 2008 Martijn was interviewed by Dutch radio station Radio 1
about wardriving in connection with the large scale credit card fraud in the
US.
