WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend: A Guide to Wireless Security [Paperback]

The first section of the book covers setting up both a laptop and a PDA for WarDriving purposes. This includes important general concepts like antenna types and their advantages and disadvantages, and connecting antenna to a wireless NIC. It also includes very specific information like specific NIC cards that work well and are conducive to the connection of external antennas and the like.

Once your hardware is set up you have to turn your attention to appropriate software. The authors detail both Windows and Linux software (free and commercial products) available to discover access points. It includes how to use NetStumbler, MiniStumbler, and Kismet to locate wireless LANs, the various options, and how to interpret the results. These are very detailed chapters and explain both the concepts and actual product use very well. Each of these chapters ends with additional software available to actually map the access points.

The final section of the book covers the details of attacking wireless networks. It includes information on finding cloaked points, hijacking, man-in-the-middle attacks, defeating MAC address filtering, and even attacking encrypted networks. In addition they include the details of enabling security on several specific models of Linksys and D-Link access points. The last part of the book covers advanced security information including configuring WiFi Protected Access, Wireless Gateway, VPN setup, RADIUS, and LEAP.

This is clearly one of the best books available on the subject of WarDriving. It provides a thorough examination of the subject, detailed explanations and instructions, and pretty much everything you need to know in this area. "WarDriving, Drive, Detect, Defend" is a very highly recommended book for anyone interested in wardriving.

It takes two seperate chapters: one on installing the Windows utility Netstumbler (with pages and pages of screen shots, when a simple "click on the icon" would do), and one on using - not "advanced options" or anything, just using - Netstumbler. Similarly, three whole chapters are dedicated to the excruciating details of installation and use of the Linux tool Kismet, but again, nothing which couldn't be found in the README files or on the website which hosts the utility. They have a chapter on how to convert Kismet and Netstumbler logfiles to maps: if you already know about Stumbverter, WiGLE, and DiGLE (or can use Google), there's nothing new here. The authors pine on for a chapter about the wardrives that they've organized. If you've ever listened to your grandparents talk about the war, it's a lot like that. Then, they have a chapter on WiFi "attacks" - if you know how to manually set your SSID and MAC, and if you've ever even heard of Airsnort, you probably won't need this nontechnical, sub-script-kiddie, Windows screen-shot-laden chapter.

If you're interested in war driving, or if you're interested in Wi-Fi security, then you're probably already conversant with the tools covered in this book. There is no real technical depth, as this book is written to a "manager's level" of technical competence. ("Click OK to continue.") Their chapter on Wi-Fi network defense essentially boils down to "change default SSID" and "use WEP"; there's a couple of pages on VPN, firewalls, and using authentication, but again, nothing to justify the purchase price of this book.