WARDRIVING - Wireless Hacking

(Southfield, Michigan) Paul Timmins and Adam Botbyl were arrested Saturday by FBI agents as they sat in a car in the parking lot of Lowe's Home Improvement store in Southfield. They are suspected of wardriving and maliciously accessing and altering the Lowe's wireless computer network. Wardriving means moving around while scanning for and connecting to wireless computer networks. It is also called warwalking, warmoving, warriding, warbussing, and WiLDing (acronym for Wireless LAN Discovery).

The men appeared before U.S. District Court Magistrate Virginia Morgan and were charged with causing damage to a protected computer system, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Both men were released on $10,000 unsecured bonds.

FBI agent Denise Stemen said in an affidavit that Lowe's alerted the FBI recently that intruders had broken into its computer at company headquarters in North Carolina, altered its computer programs and illegally intercepted credit card transactions.

Stemen said the company's computer system had been hacked repeatedly from Oct. 25 through Nov. 7. She said that the intruders gained access through the national network by logging onto a user account over the wireless network of the Lowe's store in Southfield.

The intruders accessed Lowe's headquarters and stores in six states and altered credit card processing software. On Nov. 5, they installed a malicious program that disabled several computers at the Long Beach, California, store.

Many wireless computer networks are unsecured and open to wardriving hackers using simple software. A wireless network's router will broadcast its signal up to 1,300 feet, or the length of a city block, and can be intercepted within that range.