InterceptRadio.com Forums

Hey there,

I'm curious as to the legal ramifications of all this 'war driving'.
While I can understand there being no laws broken (not a lawyer, am I wrong in this assumption?) by simply driving around and IDing signals it seems to me that certain parts of the USDOJ Cybercrime laws cover actually logging into someone elses network even though it is unsecured.

Does anyone know what our local PD's disposition is on this around the King/Pierce County areas?

Not trying to start a flame war or anything just get some accurate information like when I first started scanning and wondering if it was legal to do from the car.

Thanks for reading,
Dan.[/url]

As with regular "hacking" Its ok to "look" just don't mess with anything.

Wardriving is illegal, however it would be very very hard to catch the average joe driving around and just logging on to the internet. MAC address' don't mean a thing if thats the ONLY thing that specific card has been used for. Now if you took the same card that was connected your internet service then yes it would be easy to catch someone.

#1 If a wireless network does not have its WEP enabled, most likely that person wouldn't know where to look to see if a rougue computer was connected.

#2 If they did know and persued it, as long as the card you are using has never been attached to your personal internet account then your fine.

Most people get caught driving around with the home made pringles can antennas sitting on their dash.

I read that in London the cops had set up a wifi network to catch people logging in and causing mischief. They nailed a bunch of people.

If you do use a card that has been attached to your personal acct. You can always throw it away and get a new one. Thats what they used to do back in the day of hacking with dial-up (ditch the modem)

As far as the local police, I have no idea. It would first go through the isp and they would determine the threat (which everyone should know takes a long time and ususally nothing is ever done) Its the big business' that logging on to their network would be hard and pretty stupid.

The above is my post. Forgot to log in

Most dial-up modems do not contain uniquely identifiable information.... not that I would stand in the way if some idiot threw out a perfectly good modem.

Well that is most of what I wondered about, I really don't want to do anything that is either illegal or 'grey area' type thing. I have more than enough legal hobbies to keep me busy. Thanks for the info.

Though I could see where setting up my own access point and seeing who is 'war driving' my neighborhood could be interesting.

Stay safe,
Dan.

Theres a nifty program call air snare that will monitor your network and warn you if someone connects. You can also send them messages. Personally I don't care if someone connects to mine as long as its web surfing only. I can monitor that with packet sniffing software, which also works to my advantage. Kinda reverse hacking :twisted:

Where can I get Air Snare or other software to tell me when someone locks onto my WLAN?

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