(also war dialing, war-dialing, hammer dialing, demon dialing)
The practice of using technology to automatically scan a range of phone numbers in order to reveal connected devices such as computers, modems, and office appliances. A wardialing call looks for the handshake tones of electronic equipment and weeds out numbers that connect to human operators or answering machines.
Wardialing results can be used by hackers or cybersecurity specialists to determine security vulnerabilities and potential entry points into a system. The term itself comes from the 1983 movie WarGames. Previously, the technique was called “hammer dialing” and “demon dialing.” Even today, wardialing software is sometimes referred to as “demon dialers.”
1990s: Peter Shipley carried out a study to find modems that posed a security risk to their owners using wardialing techniques.