- "extract (a modulating signal) from its carrier."




Episode 2: "The Wardialer" - Popular in the 1980s and 1990s, "wardialing" was a popular method hackers used to find computer system to attack. Prior to the movie "WarGames", it was known as "demon dialing". Whatever you called it, there was much more to "wardialing" than just dialing a bunch of telephone phone numbers. There was a complete methodology hackers used to avoid punishment from 'Ma Bell' (The phone company) and law enforcement. There was also more to wardialing than just looking for modem carriers. Wardialing was used to identify PBX (Private Branch eXchanges), telco "test" equipment, unprotected voice mail systems, fax machines, HVAC/temperature control systems, elevators, radio towers and much. By the early 2000's, the art of wardialing was almost dead. Then hackers started to use VoIP (Voice over IP) to take wardialing in a completely new direction. In this episode of Demodulate, we discuss the old and the new school of wardialing.

This episode includes interviews by Da Beave with JFalcon, Lucky225 and HD Moore.

Episode 2: "The Wardialer" (Download)

Reddit discussion about the "The Wardialer"

First song in this episode is by Brownout
Song at the end of this episode is by Corky Wink

Links to software:

The WarVOX Github Page
The iWar Github Page

Example references of "wardials" and access code:

10-xxx access codes.
MCI access numbers
614-221-XXXX scan
Wardial of Downtown Boston, MA (1990)
Wardial of Boston (226 NXX) - (1988)

Video of PSTN-based Cartography presented at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York City in 2010. This talk discusses "back spoofing" and war dialing.

Demo of iWar demo. This version used KissFFT rather than a modem to detect. This is another demo of iWar. This give you an idea of the speed a prefix could be scanned. Unfortunately, the this code was lost :(

Video of Toneloc and Bluebeep in action (DOSBox).

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