I guess many are not aware of this term which is doing the round in the world of security engineer and hackers. This time, the hacking group has brought the fight to the town and the street itself.

Next time when you are out shopping in your local mall with wireless networks, you could end up being the target of a hacker group on the move prowling for weak/insecure wireless networks. Wardriving basically means a computer user driving around searching for insecure wireless networks. And all the hacker need to steal the credit card and other information from the shop is a standard laptop with good wireless card which can pick up signal from the wireless network in the vicinity along with a copy of "NetStumbler".

Armed with such deadly tool, one can discover and allow you to jump into any open network that has not been secured with some combination of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). But that is also not enough these days as security experts are already saying that the WEP protocol , one of the oldest and the most widely used, can be hacked in a matter of seconds. And hackers engaging in wardriving are mostly looking for stores which uses outdated security systems like WEP. Also another group of people caled "war chalkers" are already marking out streets and buildings with war-driving symbols indicating the location of a wireless network and its security status.

Information security is all about CIA - Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. War-driving attacks compromise the first two. Still lots has to be done wrt to wireless security. Experts still recommend not relying on wireless networks to provide mission critical applications and information in the hostile environment.

It is most probable that the terrorist group, Indian Mujahideen, has used this hacking technique to hack and send the terror mails in India after the recent serial blasts in major Indian cities in which many innocent lives were lost and normal lives severely thrown hay-wire. More on the serial blast in Indian can be found from here.

Moral: Before deploying your own wireless networks, test it with all the attack tools available on the net and check their weakpoints. Most of the time, the attack type is DoS.