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As his taxi crawled through traffic in downtown Toronto, Ben Sapiro fired up his laptop and, cradling a small antenna about the size of a kid's hockey trophy, prepared to peek into the private computer networks that live high up inside Bay Street's cold, shiny walls.
"There," he said, holding his screen so the backseat passengers could see it. "That green circle means a great signal lock -- there's [a LAN] really close by. This name that just came up (WavePON) is the default manufacturer's name for its hardware. That shows that someone just dropped the hardware right into the system without reconfiguring or encrypting it at all.
"Now we keep driving on, out of range, because Canadian law is very strict on hacking."
However, Sapiro added, if he were an unscrupulous user, with just a few clicks the software he's using could reconfigure his system to talk to the network he's located.
That would give him access to its private data -- including anything one of its employees could see.
Although he keeps an eye on hackers, crackers and script kiddies, Sapiro is actually a Toronto-based senior consultant for information risk management with management consulting firm KPMG LLP. He held a demonstration of "war driving" recently for a small group of journalists.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
War driving, the practice of cruising downtown streets and looking for open wireless local area networks (LANs), is the newest hacker strategy to boil up from the geek underground. Already reported in the San Francisco Bay area, Chicago and locations in Europe, its name comes from its similarity to "war dialling", a...