Montreal region War drive march 2008

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On Saturday, March 29th, 2008 from 9:00a.m. To 12:00 noon, students from the Champlain College's (Saint-Lambert) Wireless Networking program under the supervision of their professor, performed a wireless network security audit in the streets of the South Shore of Montreal, Quebec, Canada as an educational activity. This article presents an overview of what was done and a summary of the results. The full results are available here:

http://www.leger.ca/pages/CHAMPLAIN/w08_audit_results.htm

During the war drive a total of 8488 devices where found, which is the sample used for the rest of this article (n=8488).

Table 1: summary of results

There are many apparent similarities in all measures. Of the devices included in the sample, 22.7% where unencrypted. This is moderately better that the 24% identified in the previous exercise and much better than the 31% from the previous year. This shows an improvement from the previous year.

As in the previous exercise, the potential problem of the close proximity of multiple wireless devices using the same frequency and the same channel (6 and 11) was found. There must be performance problems experienced by the users of the devices, however, this was outside the scope of the project as the students did not have access to the tools required to evaluate this. Other channels used are 36 (1 AP), 52 (4 APs) and 64 (1 AP). This is possibly in an ill-advised attempt to implement some security.

Conclusion

Compared to previous years the data is good news as it shows some improvement in the level of risk and the wireless network security.

Looking at the results it seems that wireless security in networks is still not too good but it is marginally improvng. While the results may not be as catastrophic as the previous exercise indicated, it is still far from being an ideal situation in the current economic and geopolitical context. This would again support beliefs that on-going and continuous IT security awareness campaign is needed, as only through education can durable social change can be enacted.