Bar The Gates! Wardrivers On The Loose!

from the but,-think-of-the-children... dept

Following what we're still hoping was a bit of a modest proposal last week suggesting police crack down on open WiFi, a private community in Scottsdale, Arizona is up in arms over supposed wardrivers ripping apart their neighborhood. The article is very weak on details, but suggests that a resident "buzzed in" a computer consultant to the community who was later found (oh no!) sitting in his car using a computer!!! How dare he?!? On top of that, the same resident who buzzed the guy in claims he had an unauthorized charge on his credit card that same month. Enough to make you suspicious? Perhaps, but considering that almost every site asking for credit cards has encryption, it's unlikely that anyone wardriving (which is usually more about trolling for access than hacking into someone's personal info) pulled his credit card. Besides, who in their right mind would hack into the same computer system of the guy who buzzed you into the community? It seems a lot more likely that this guy was checking his email or something a lot less sinister than the article suggests.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 4 Oct 2004 @ 4:42pm

    No Subject Given

    Tycho (of Penny Arcade) took a little tour of the hotel lan when he was at E3 and found a whole bunch of people had their C drive shared. That, coupled with an open access point could conceivably lead to war driving for credit cards. However, I'm of the opinion that if your CC# is stolen you'll have a lot more than one erroneous charge by the end of the month.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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