Skip to main content

Why WiGLE?

 In August 2018 a couple of friendly hackers who find their home in the Wireless Village introduced me to WiGLE! I was familiar with wardriving, but it was not efficient and was more, and shall we say -- purposeful. 

Wardriving has many benefits when gathered with purpose. Who am I talking about? obviously WiGLE. Prior to WiGLE, I used a few tools like airmon-ng/airdump-ng, and then processed everything either through tshark, Wireshark, tcpdump, and NetworkMiner. So, I never had a need to get into wardriving, per se. The group introduced me, and that's how it all got started! 

So why wardriving? WiGLE's scoring system and groups make it way more fun. There are many great was wardriving helps others - and I stole these points right from the WiGLE FAQ section, and added a few of my own. 

  • It's fun: time to compete with others around the world! 
    • WiGLE has given me the opportunity to make new friends! Some of us are spread across the world, but we're all able to work on a team together to increase our team rank. We're doing pretty good. 
    • The group that made and maintains WiGLE are an awesome set of people too!
  • It's moderately accessible: whether you're scooting, walking, bussin', driving, you can map networks!
  • It helps others look for free wifi! Millions of Americans rely on free wifi, particularly from places like libraries. 
    • In my dnsprincess-opinion, the internet is a utility that should be provided for, but unfortunately, it's not. If you're curious about the debate around broadband, read this article.
  • Journalism: "WiGLE is a handy resource for journalists looking for data points on Wifi proliferation, statistics, and security. WiGLE keeps statistics on manufacturer distribution, top SSID's, encryption modes, channel selection, geographic distribution and much more."
  • Site surveys and perimeter network access: Site surveys help businesses understand what networks they have present at their facility if the APs need their channels or power adjusted, etc. WiGLE can help identify employee-created networks or malicious APs. 
  • Research Projects & Class Assignments! I've made a handful of network security assignments based on using the information found from WiGLE. Most of the time I link to digital forensics. Here's an example question:
    • You've received a phone for forensic processing. One of the artifacts you found was the last wireless network the phone was connected to at the time of the crime 88:3d:24:b5:ce:6b 
    • What type of device what found? What was the location of the device? Is this a reliable network to establish a location? (ps the last answer is no.
  • Helping others and the public: It's important for everyone to understand their network affects their personal security. "Most users didn't realize that their private networks could be accessed by anyone in the area (at various distances with antennas and amplifiers). WiGLE, and Wardriving in general, helped to educate users and put pressure on manufacturers to make network security better and easier. Nowadays WPA2 is the standard and defaults to "on" for most manufactured devices."
  • Creates a community of fun hackers! Check out the wireless village

In the next post I'll talk about my covert cute setup (warwalking, warscootin'), and my truck setup (wardriving)! Until then, find an old laptop and run kismet or get an android phone and download WiGLE! You can sign up for an account and sign up now!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Wardrive: Know where to go

Inspired by others, and my goal of getting a golden WiGLE badge, I went wardriving for my birthday. I was hoping for 50k, and I ended up with just over 61k. I'm less than 80k away from my goal! But how do you pick a place to wardrive, and how do you actually do  it? The easiest way is to download WiGLE on an android phone, get some transportation, and be set on your way. But if you want more detail or some tips, keep reading.  Avon Lady Method : Find a city within reasonable distance of travel Examine the results for the past few years of the area; do not use the overall coverage of all time.  Verify if the city is desirable for wardriving Little coverage in the past few years Most residential areas are not covered Use maps to search and define high density residential areas (i.e. apartments, town homes).  Create an order that allows for little overlapping and in a convenient driving pattern. Use landmarks around the city to define the internal roads Wardrive Profit ("internet

The Browser Poll

 Which browser do you use? Thanks for any boosts! I wanna know! Oh cool! More internet points! I made this poll and it got some attention so I thought I'd share it.  The first 54 votes of 26,177 were erased after I edited the poll. If you edit a poll's options, such as adding one, all of the votes go back to zero. Oops. I forgot to add safari, and are large amount of people let me know. The most popular "other" answer was  Vivaldi . Other popular answers were versions of Chromium and DuckDuckGo.  While this was the final results, for a majority of the time, Firefox has a much stronger lead against Chrome. The poll started first around infosec.exchange  when the lead was large, and as the poll moved around the fediverse, the gap narrowed.  A couple other comments sounded like "Why only one option" or why they picked their particular browser. I definitely got the information I was looking for. Check out the post  for more replies and cool facts!  Edit 12/4: A

My next talk: Come see me at CactusCon 2023!

Your smartphone is your best friend and worst enemy. Are you being listened to? Do you want to listen to someone else? This apps on your phone know more about you than you think, and there are more tools to make you cringe. Yes and no, “they are listening.” The apps are gathering so much information it seems like they are listening. This talk will discuss what privacy concerns you should have with your smartphone and will discuss how you can use your smartphone to do some surveillance of your own.