Caught With Their Pants Down
I went wardriving last night for the first time in about a year. Last time I went I used Netstumbler on Windows98, this time I did it right and was using Kismet on Fedora Core 1. I drove around Midland for about an hour and a half and I really had a good time–it was very relaxing. I couldn’t have picked a better night to go, it was nice and cool and the air was still fresh from the recent rain. Setting up the rig took about 15 minutes (most of that time waiting for the laptop to boot), the antennae, kismet and my GPS receiver worked flawlessly.
The result: 
Lets just say I’m extremely disappointed in my fellow Midlanders. Out of 661 network that I detected 20% didn’t bother changing the default configuration and 35% are not using WEP. Pretty bad considering I only traveled along Midland’s major roadways, I didn’t even go into neighborhoods to get more detail. You would think that people would have at least bothered to change the default settings. Soon I’ll try and get out again and get a more detailed scan, but that might not happen for a couple of months. Maybe I can get some of my fellow PBLUG members to scan a section of the city, that way we can cover the entire city more quickly.
