War dialing
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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 Template:Ref.
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 technque which also involves automating a computer modem in order to repeatedly place telephone calls.
See also
- demon dialing
- Toneloc, a famous war dialer for DOS.
- wardriving