100% Made-In-Singapore with ThinkSECURE-proprietary code, MoocherHunter was first unveiled to Southeast-Asian law enforcement officials at the Singapore Police Force's invitation-only CyberCrime Investigation Workshop 2008 held in Singapore in April 2008.

MoocherHunter is licensed under the MoocherHunter License as part of the OSWA-Assistant wireless auditing LiveCD toolkit (note: only on version 0.9.0.3b and above) which is free for end-user download at https://oswa-assistant.securitystartshere.org.

MoocherHunter identifies the location of an 802.11-based wireless moocher or hacker by the traffic they send across the network. If they want to mooch from you or use your wireless network for illegal purposes (e.g. warez downloading or illegal filesharing), then they have no choice but to reveal themselves by sending traffic across in order to accomplish their objectives. MoocherHunter™ enables the owner of the wireless network to detect traffic from this unauthorized wireless client (using either MoocherHunter™'s Passive or Active mode) and enables the owner, armed with a laptop and directional antenna, to isolate and track down the source.

Because it is not based on fixed or statically-positioned hardware, MoocherHunter allows the user to move freely and walk towards the actual geographical location of the moocher/hacker. And of course, as part of the free OSWA-Assistant wireless auditing LiveCD toolkit, MoocherHunter is also FREE for end-users to use on their existing laptops (so long as it is only run within the OSWA-Assistant environment) with off-the-shelf supported wireless cards.

In residential and commercial multi-tenant building field trials held in Singapore in March 2008, MoocherHunter allowed a single trained operator to geo-locate a wireless moocher with a geographical positional accuracy of as little as 2 meters within an average of 30 minutes.

Notes:

  1. For accurate and proper results, please remember to use a directional antenna, and not an omni-directional one, regardless of whether it claims to be high-gain or not.
  2. If you get a Segmentation Fault while running MoocherHunter™ (e.g. your WNIC shuts itself down halfway), please make sure the process is killed before restarting. You can issue a "ps -eaf" command, look for the process ID tied in to the segfaulted process and then type "kill (process ID)" where (process ID) is the PID number.
  3. As of version 0.6.5, please make sure you select the correct chipset which your wireless card is based on, otherwise your results will be wrong, even if the program starts up. The officially-supported chipsets for MoocherHunter™ ver 0.6.9a & up are: Prism54G(HARDMAC), Atheros (all models before AR9xxx series), RTL8187, RT2500, RT2570, IPW2200 and IPW2915.