I had an idea regarding WiFi cracking communities. Had it for a long time, thinking about actually making an attempt to start it up now. This one works on any scale, the bigger the better though. Maybe...

PROBLEM
I'm in the city allot, work uni etc. When I get my lunch, or have a break, I want to just sit down in a decent spot and get online with my laptop for a while. So I do a scan for wireless networks, fucking dozens of them. All WEP/WPA/WPA2 encrypted.

By the time I finish cracking the thing, lunch time has depleted, as has my battery, and the birds have eaten my sandwich. I don't need to get the key again, however I will when I sit somewhere else. As will someone else. Poor networks getting cracked all day long...

So....

Solution:
Wouldn't it be useful if a few people went around the city, cracking the WEP's, and sharing the keys with each other? With enough decent people, and a little time, the majority of the city center would be one big open network for us.

Yes the keys could change, and this relies on allot of trust among friends. But the end result would be awesome.


If the community grew large enough, a couple hackers per city. No matter what city you went to, free WiFi in a big sector.

Obviously the keys couldn't be posted on a regular www. A BBS with passworded FTP server possibly. Only once you submit a couple working keys, do you get a password etc. Or a mailing list.

Thoughts?

[Bear in mind that I live in the UK, Scotland has only 6 cities.]

I'm not aiming for 100% coverage, although that would be nice. Just the common places, so you don't have to pay for Starbucks internet, or you can just find a bench somewhere, and will be able to connect.

Don't think this will happen.

Is already happening between myself and a few friends, so don't see why it couldn't.

I mean not on a large scale, I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands.

IIRC most of the cities in South Africa are logged like this. Mostly the groups stay underground, though.

lol I'm pretty sure something like this is probably already happening. I have no doubt that people have a ring of friends who personally go out and crack wifi spots and then pass on the keys or even sell them.

Only recently my friend moved into a new place which is quite close to the city and asked me to come over and crack some near by wifi spots. So I'm sure it happens a lot.

Wargsm, what you can do is, when you're on your lunch break drive around to near by neighbour hoods, whilst having wireless activated. No doubt you'll find some plonker who leaves his wireless router switched on by the mains 24/7 with no encryption. Then just remember where that location is and drive there every lunch time.

Wifi spots in the city will always likely be encrypted down to them being business ones. But a lot of wifi spots that belong to an average internet user will sometimes have no encryption.

It doesn't matter if it's encrypted, you can crack a WEP key in 10 minutes with the right hardware and favorable conditions (signal strength).

Yea I'm perfectly aware of that, but still if he chooses to drive to any near by neighbourhood, it's almost certain that he'll find a wifi spot that he doesn't have to waste ten min to crack, kinda solving the problem he's having.

But, I guess he has a good idea, if he wants to remain in the city.

A lot of routers have WEP by default now. It's best to just crack as much as you can.

Its called warchalking.
Warchalking is not centralized or electronic, but who needs that. If you can see the symbol you dont need to connect to a website. And if you dont have internet, you cant connect to the website anyway.