It’s been a while since we posted about anything important. Sorry about that guys, some other stuff is taking off and haven’t had much time to devote to this site. Today we present you with a little article about war dialing.

If you’re not familiar with war dialing, it’s a term from the BBS era, when we’d use things like Toneloc, and Bluebeep to search for modems that answered. This would give us huge lists of BBS’s, banks, government offices and all sorts of cool things we could try to login to, or just share with friends.

Fast forward about a decade and a half, and now we have VOIP. You didn’t think people wouldn’t use war dialers with VOIP too did you, because you’re wrong if you did. VOIP is a tremendously easy and fast way to use war dialers, both for finding dialup modems and for many other uses (pretty much anything you can think of).

Today we have a couple war dialers that we’ve found out there on the tubes;

iWAR – http://www.softwink.com/iwar/ - The war dialer your mother told you not to play with. This war dialer is completely free, and is written in C for Unix (will work on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc). Might even work with some trickery on windows with an emulator though we have not tried. This software has been around for a while and has an extensive feature list available. To name just a few of the highlights;

  • Full and normal logging
  • Ascii flat file and MySQL Logging
  • Random or sequential dialing
  • Remote System Identification
  • Supports regular modems or IAX2
  • Much much more

iWAR has been around for a while, and we’ve even posted about it before. If you’re looking for something to test out your systems (legally only of course!) or to test your clients system this is a great way to do it, especially with the modem and IAX support it has. iWAR is affiliated with the wicked cool Telephreak.org one of the neatest “greyhat” VOIP sites and services around. Check them out when you can.

We’ve also come across one other VOIP based war dialer.

WarVOX - http://warvox.org/ – Is a new suite of tools for exploring, classifying, and auditing telephone systems. Unlike normal wardialing tools, WarVOX works with the actual audio from each call and does not use a modem directly. This model allows WarVOX to find and classify a wide range of interesting lines, including modems, faxes, voice mail boxes, PBXs, loops, dial tones, IVRs, and forwarders. WarVOX provides the unique ability to classify all telephone lines in a given range, not just those connected to modems, allowing for a comprehensive audit of a telephone system.

WarVOX is a great tool for finding all sorts of interesting numbers or systems out there, not to mention it’s great for securing your onsite, or client VOIP installations. Go ahead and give WarVOX a try.

And finally we come to the last War Dialer, this one created in Python

PAW/PAWS Wardialer - http://www.wyae.de/software/paw/ – PAW / PAWS is a wardialing software in python. It is designed to scan for ISDN (PAWS only) and “modern” analog modems (running at 9.6kbit/s or higher). Wardialing tools are – despite their martialic naming – used to find nonauthorized modems so one can disable those and as result make access to the internal network harder.

Obviously, PAWS doesn’t have much use in North America (but it does have some!) – it’s more geared towards European testing and analysis. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

If you need some DID’s to do your testing from, don’t forget to check out Link2Voip for cheap rates and cheap DIDs!

Know of any other cool war dialers? Let us know in the comments!