Deepone
Jun 11 2004, 01:33 PM
| QUOTE |
| How many wireless access points are out there? How many have security features turned on? On April 27, 2004 Humphrey Cheung, an editor for THG, along with three other hackers took to the skies to find out. Flying in two small airplanes and using cheap off-the-shelf components, they found 4500+ wireless access points (WAPS). Surprisingly, only 30% of the access points had encryption turned on. In addition, a successful video conferencing session was done between the planes. In fact, this may have been the first successful video chat between two small planes using everyday hardware. |
| QUOTE |
| Team Tomshardware found 1433 access points with 380 encrypted and 1053 unencrypted. Team Dailywireless found 3151 access points with 1026 encrypted and 2125 unencrypted. Dailywireless found more WAPs because of higher powered antennas and the Kismet program. Kismet is able to detect WAPs that NetStumbler misses, like WAPs with cloaked SSIDs. Some WAPs have a "Cloak SSID" feature that allows them to operate without blasting out the SSID to the world. |
full story here: 'http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20040430/index.html
Taggard
Jun 15 2004, 10:17 AM
It's nice to know about utilities for sniffing out cloaked SSIDs. This utility seems useful if one were to need to do a wireless install in an area and wanted to make sure there was no interference within certain channels. You can always use frequency sniffing equiptment, but this utility makes for a better utility than netstumbler that uses over-the-counter wireless equiptment to see what networks are in the area.
Thanks for the tip. This will certainly help save me some time and resources at some point soon.