The art of war-driving
Wardriving involves detecting wireless networks while moving around on foot or in a vehicle. Hackers sometimes do this to look for vulnerable networks to exploit.
As an ethical hacker, you’ll be doing this to make sure there are no rogue wireless networks in your home or network because these can cause interference with legitimate access points. You may also want to be sure your own wireless network is safely hidden.
To start out as a wardriver, you’ll need a wireless network card or dongle that can be put into ‘monitoring’ mode. This is used to detect wireless networks passively, without interfering with them. Not all network cards support this feature. In Ubuntu Linux you can check if yours does using the command sudo ifconfig wlan0 down && sudo iwconfig mode monitor where wlan0 is the name of your wireless interface. This guide was written using a TP-Link TL-WN823N USB Wi-Fi adapter (£7 on Amazon UK).
You’ll also need a GPS device to pinpoint the location of wireless access points more easily. Whichever model you choose, check that it’s compatible with Linux before buying. During testing, we found that the GlobalSat BU-353-S4 USB GPS Receiver worked out of the box with Kali Linux.
If you’re using Kali in a virtual machine, make sure to follow the steps ( see the previous page) to set up a second network interface, as you’ll need access to the internet to download the files to get the GPS device working.
Virtualbox also can’t use USB devices by default. If you’ve chosen to install Kali to a virtual disk image, you can download the Guest Additions into Virtualbox which will allow additional features including support for USB devices. Simply fire up the Kali virtual machine and click the Devices menu, then Insert Guest Additions CD Image. Once you’ve followed the steps, restart the Kali virtual machine and click the Devices menu again. Move your mouse over USB. From there you can choose to connect your USB Wi-Fi adapter and GPS device by checking the tick box next to their names.
Once Kali loads, follow the steps in the tutorial ( below) to get your GPS device working. Next, open Terminal and run the command kismet -l. This will start Kismet, the wardriver’s tool of choice for monitoring Wi-Fi networks. Navigate using the arrow keys and press Enter to make selections.
You’ll be asked if you can see the colours. Press Enter to confirm, then again, ignoring the warning about root users. Kismet will say that it can’t detect a packet source. Press Enter to add the name of your wireless interface. (This’ll most likely be wlan0, but run the command ifconfig if you’re unsure.) Use Tab to highlight the Add button then press Enter. Do the same to close the Console Window to open Kismet’s main window.
As Kismet runs it’ll create a file in your home folder with the extension .netxml. You can use this with map software to plot the location of Wi-Fi networks around you.
The handy companion tool to kismet, giskismet, can convert the data you gather to a KML data file, which can be used by most Earth browsers such as Google Earth.