Today after the movies, Matthew and Stuart came back to my place. We decided to go searching for wireless networks in the area with my new ibook. Personally I didn’t think we’d find any, but I was interested to see.

I downloaded a program called Macstumbler, like netstumbler but for mac. I like it because it continuously searches for wireless networks.

Anyway at the bottom of my street up popped a wireless network with the SSID ‘workgroup’ and no encryption turned on. Interesting. So I joined the network. I got an ip address of 192.168.0.3. So I tried typing google into my browser, didn’t work. I went to the address 192.168.0.1 and up popped a netgear password logging page. Anyway I tried the username: admin and the password: password. It worked. Scary. I had access to their wireless router. Anyway I disconnected and we continued walking.

During that time we found about 25 wireless access points. About 10 of which had no encryption, 5 of which the internet worked on (just tested doing a ping to ii.net and going to google.com), and 2 which the access point password was not changed. Most of the access points we found were running on netgear stuff.

I was really surprised to find so many networks and ones where there was no encryption.

We couldn’t pin point the houses where the wireless was coming from although I know the general idea.

I’m going to type up a thing about wireless security and do a letter box drop in the area. It was really scary!!

Anyway it was fun, we didn’t download anything just checked to see if google.com worked. Although now I know where to check my email if iinet goes down :p

Interesting Stuff.