Mapping wireless networks

I recently had reason to do a little wireless investigation at work. There was some concern that there may be a wireless access point attached to the network that had been setup insecurely. So I grabbed my laptop and my USB GPS device and scampered off like a kid on his way to the candy store. I did some passive investigation from the parking lot with Kismet and NetStumbler. If you aren't familiar with these tools, I can't recommend them strongly enough. When using these tools together, the WiFi data you can collect is amazing, especially if you use them in conjunction with GPS. Ok, so you've got this data....now what? That's where WiGLE comes into play. WiGLE, the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine, is a clearing house for files collected by people all over the world when wardriving, warwalking, wardancing, or warskippingaboutlikealoon. You upload your file to the WiGLE site and it crunches the data and makes the results available for download. Using one of the WiGLE clients (I really like the Java-based client, JiGLE), you can download data for any number of areas and it gives you maps and locations of all of the identified APs. JiGLE allows you to view area polygons, displaying the coverage area of a given AP, as shown here:

With a little bit of effort, you can even import JiGLE data into Google Earth. Now that, friends and neighbors, is cool; simple as that. WiGLE is a great tool to have in your back pocket.

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