Google’s ‘Engineer Doe’ Known for Wi-Fi Hacking Tool

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/marius_milne/

By Robert McMillan
Threat Level
Wired.com
May 1, 2012

The author of a software program credited with bringing war-driving to 
the masses was Google’s Engineer Doe, the author of the company’s 
controversial Street View Wi-Fi logging program, according to a report 
in The New York Times.

The Google engineer who built the software, identified until now only as 
“Engineer Doe,” is Marius Milner, the Times said, citing an unnamed 
former state investigator working on a Street View inquiry.

The practice of driving around cities and logging open wireless access 
points is known as war-driving, and that’s essentially what Google ended 
up doing with its Street View program. In the early days of Wi-Fi, it 
was a way to find open connections that could be used to get online for 
free.

Milner, a software engineer with Google since 2003, is well known within 
the wireless-hacking community, according to Brad Haines, an independent 
security consultant known as RenderMan who has spoken on wireless 
hacking.

In an audit made public in 2010, Google called its Wi-Fi logging 
software Gstumbler. In retrospect, that should have been a tip-off.

[...]

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