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War dialing or wardialing is a method of automatically scanning telephone numbers using a modem, usually dialing every telephone number in a local area to find where computers or fax machines are available, then attempting to access them by guessing passwords.

The name for this technique originated in 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. The name "war dialing" rapidly became popular within computing culture.

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. The aim of wardriving is to gain access to Wi-Fi network with some techniques related to hacking.

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 wardialing, however, port scans will generally not disturb a human being when it tries an IP address that isn't up. Related to wardriving is warchalking, the practice of drawing chalk symbols in public places to advertise the availability of wireless networks. Despite its widespread coverage, warchalking never particularly caught on as a popular activity.

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.

In response to the popularity of wardialing, many states enacted legislation in the 1980's prohibiting the use of a device to dial telephone numbers without the intent of communicating with a person.

Trivia

• Sandstorm Enterprises has a patent U.S. patent 6,490,349 on the multi-line war dialer. ("System and Method for Scan-Dialing Telephone Numbers and Classifying Equipment Connected to Telephone Lines Associated therewith.") The patent is practiced in Sandstorm's PhoneSweep war dialer.
• 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.
• An episode of Hannah Montana had a character war dialing in order to make mulitple calls to a radio station to be the 24th caller to win Los Angeles Lakers tickets. Ironically, radio stations started announcing a random number for order of precedence in callers in order to circumvent war dialing.

See also

• demon dialing
• toneloc, a famous war dialer for DOS.
• tmap, ISDN-based war dialer for Windows and Linux.
• wardriving
• warflying
• Vishing

References

1. Wargames, Wardialing, Wardriving, and the Emerging Market for Hacker Ethics

• Articles lacking sources from April 2007
• Telephony
• Security exploits