War Drivers

High-tech hobbyists are cruising our neighborhoods looking for wireless networks and information.

As if you didn’t have enough to worry about.

That car that just drove up the street by your house? Look closely. If the driver is banging on a laptop in the passenger seat, chances are you and your home or business wireless network have been tagged.

What that guy in the late-model import car is doing out there may or may not be illegal depending on how he tags you. If he hacks into your unprotected network, you and he could be in big trouble. If he doesn’t or if your network is secure, well, then he’s probably just one of a new breed of high-tech voyeurs known as “war drivers.”

War driving is a play on the older term war dialing, which involved “automatically calling thousands of telephone numbers to look for any that have a modem attached.” The term “war dialing” emerged from the cult classic 1983 computer movie War Games. In that film, a high-school hacker played by Matthew Broderick is using war dialing to look for computer games...