Ghosts In The Aether

I still war-drive; been doing it since the Linksys Channel 6 days. I even have an old WRT54GS I keep turned on. The only boxes attached to it are a web server running an ancient version BSD with a few obvious vulnerabilities left open, and a packet sniffer. It’s a SETI installation. So far nobody has tried for entry to Interzone.

Most of time when I’m war-driving I see the usual home and business WiFi nodes running encryption, and the public networks you can access at the supermarket or bookstore. Every now and then some cheeky user changes the SSID to something like “FBI Van.” Sometimes however I see something different. An unencrypted WiFi node will show up in the middle of nowhere with an SSID of “l0pht,” “IIRGnet,” or “2600.” Sometimes the SSID looks like a phone number or set of coordinates. Those are the ones that make me nervous.