The art of war driving and security threats - a Malaysian case study

The fact that wireless local area networks (WLAN) use radio spectrum for transmitting data has with it pros and cons. Mobility without wires and the ease to move around to connect to network resources has made IEEE802.11 WLANs quite popular. The users need to have a laptop with a wireless network adapter that negotiates with an access point. Once authenticated and associated with the access point, the user can easily move around in the transmission range of the access point without losing data or network connection enjoying bandwidths of the order of multiples of 10 Mega bytes. On the negative side, these wireless LANs tend to have fuzzy boundaries, making it easy for an intruder to capture these transmission signals with a receiving device fitted with a sensitive antenna. An analysis of these captured packets can be good news to the intruder. We try to investigate on war driving (an act of locating wireless networks from within a moving vehicle), on interception of transmission data from the located wireless LANs in some of the highways in our country and on doing a brief analysis of that, eventually discussing on the attacks and security precautions.