War dialing
War dialing or
wardialing was the act of using a
modem to dial every
telephone number in a local area to find out where computers are available, then attempting to access them by guessing passwords.
The name for this technique refers to the 1983 film
WarGames. In the film, the protagonist programs his computer to dial every telephone number in
Sunnyvale, CA in order to find other computer systems. Although the technique predates the film, the name "war dialing" rapidly became popular within computing culture
[Wargames, Wardialing, Wardriving, and the Emerging Market for Hacker Ethics].
A more recent phenomenon is
wardriving, the searching for
Wi-Fi wireless networks by
moving vehicle. Wardriving was named after wardialing, since both techniques involve brute-force searches to find computer networks.
Similar to war dialing is a
port scan under TCP/IP, which "dials" every
TCP port of every
IP address to find out what services are available, then gaining access to them by guessing passwords or by exploiting vulnerabilities in software that runs with elevated privileges. Unlike demon dialing, however, port scans will generally not disturb a human being when it tries an IP address that isn't up.
The term is also used today by analogy for various sorts of exhaustive
brute force attack against an authentication mechanism, such as a password. While a
dictionary attack might involve trying each word in a dictionary as the password, "wardialing the password" would involve trying every possible password.
War dialing is sometimes used as a synonym for
Demon dialing, a related technique which also involves automating a computer modem in order to repeatedly place telephone calls.
*One of the segments on the 2006 audio/visual project
Greedy Baby, by
Plaid and
Bob Jaroc, entitled "War Dialer," is based on this concept.
*
demon dialing*
toneloc, a famous war dialer for
DOS.
*
wardriving*
warflying
