The BBC posted a sensationalistic article about 'war pedalling' entitled 'Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking'
"BBC News Online was shown just how easy it was by two ethical hackers who prefer to be known as Codex and Kuji. We drove with the pair around London's financial district."
Well, where were you 6 months ago, guys? ;-)
"Any maliciously minded hacker could easily join these networks and piggy back on their fast net links, steal documents or subvert other machines on the systems to do their bidding."
"None of the wireless networks we found used anything but their flawed, in-built security systems to protect against hack attacks.
Ouch, for their own sake, I hope the BBC don't mean that. If this is accurate (it may not be), this means the BBC accompanied two 'ethical hackers' while they not only mapped wireless gateways, but attempted to probe for security holes & vulnerabilities beyond the wireless gateway.
Probing a network in such a manner could be construed (especially by its owner) as a hostile act. Without prior consent of the owner of the network, it is at best unethical and at worst, even perhaps illegal.
If scanning, sniffing, and vulnerability probing was performed on networks as they 'drove by', they were accessing networks and computers without authority. They would be in possession of detailed roadmaps of weaknesses on networks and hosts perhaps deep within each network they passed.
warpeddlaz do not condone or engage such activities.
[Clarification: Just in case you haven't got this, warpeddlaz only detect beaconing and associations at the 802.11 level. No network IP traffic is sent or sniffed when performing war peddling. No IP networks are probed, monitored, or used. At all.]
I suspect the BBC should research exactly what the act of 'war driving/peddalling/walking' actually is, given the analogy of 'war dialing'. Despite the emotive word 'war', war dialing is merely the action of detecting what was at the end of a phone line (human, fax, modem, or menu system, or ...). By definition, this did not include any subsequent hostile network attack.