ESP8266 wardriver on a breadboard with the OLED showing GPS, Wi-Fi and SD icons

Finishing What I Started: Building an ESP8266 Wardriver a Year After PWNED 0x08

Last year I attended PWNED 0x08, a cybersecurity conference here in Costa Rica, and signed up for the workshop “RF Exploration: Introduction to Sniffing with ESP32/ESP8266.” The goal was simple and very fun: build a pocket-sized wardriver, a device that listens for Wi-Fi networks around you, tags each one with a GPS position, logs everything to an SD card and shows its status on a small screen. I walked out of that workshop with a bag of parts and a project I hadn’t finished. ...

September 1, 2026 · 10 min · Bernardo Alfaro