The term wardriving generally covers the practice of discovering and mapping the wireless networks available in a particular area. Useful statistics are gathered from this activity, including statistics on the encryption used in discovered networks. Wardriving does not include the unethical activity of unauthorised connection to wifi networks (encrypted or unencrypted).



Warwalking , or warjogging , is similar to wardriving, but is done on foot rather than from a moving vehicle. Today you could just use Wardriving Apps on your smartphone. But using inexpensive ESP8266-based modules you can make yourself a much smaller device that fits in the palm of your hand thanks to R ay Burnette.



The chip first came to the attention of western makers in 2014 when Espressif released a SDK that allowed the chip to be programmed, removing the need for a separate microcontroller. Thanks to the Arduino-compatible firmware for the ESP8266 which makes accessing the WiFi functionality easy - along with controlling inexpensive OLED displays. The combination of the two and a power supply rounds the device off which will scan for open networks and display their SSID, for example: The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif Systems.