Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By : Vivek Ramachandran
Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By: Vivek Ramachandran

Overview of this book

Wireless has become ubiquitous in today’s world. The mobility and flexibility provided by it makes our lives more comfortable and productive. But this comes at a cost – Wireless technologies are inherently insecure and can be easily broken. BackTrack is a penetration testing and security auditing distribution that comes with a myriad of wireless networking tools used to simulate network attacks and detect security loopholes. Backtrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide will take you through the journey of becoming a Wireless hacker. You will learn various wireless testing methodologies taught using live examples, which you will implement throughout this book. The engaging practical sessions very gradually grow in complexity giving you enough time to ramp up before you get to advanced wireless attacks.This book will take you through the basic concepts in Wireless and creating a lab environment for your experiments to the business of different lab sessions in wireless security basics, slowly turn on the heat and move to more complicated scenarios, and finally end your journey by conducting bleeding edge wireless attacks in your lab.There are many interesting and new things that you will learn in this book – War Driving, WLAN packet sniffing, Network Scanning, Circumventing hidden SSIDs and MAC filters, bypassing Shared Authentication, Cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, Access Point MAC spoofing, Rogue Devices, Evil Twins, Denial of Service attacks, Viral SSIDs, Honeypot and Hotspot attacks, Caffe Latte WEP Attack, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Evading Wireless Intrusion Prevention systems and a bunch of other cutting edge wireless attacks.If you were ever curious about what wireless security and hacking was all about, then this book will get you started by providing you with the knowledge and practical know-how to become a wireless hacker.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – installing BackTrack


BackTrack is relatively simple to install. We will run BackTrack by booting it as a Live DVD and then install it on the hard drive.

Perform the following instructions step-by-step:

  1. Burn the BackTrack ISO (we are using the BackTrack 5 KDE 32-Bit edition) that you have downloaded into a bootable DVD.

  2. Boot the laptop with this DVD and select the option BackTrack Text – Default Boot Text Mode from the boot menu:

  3. If booting was successful then you should see the familiar BackTrack screen:

  4. You can boot into the graphical mode by entering startx on the command prompt. Enjoy the boot music! Once you are in the GUI, your screen should resemble the following:

  5. Now click on the Install BackTrack icon to the top-left of the desktop. This will launch the BackTrack installer as shown next:

  6. This installer is similar to the GUI-based installers of most Linux systems and should be simple to follow. Select the appropriate options in each screen and start the installation process. Once the installation is done, restart the machine as prompted, and remove the DVD.

  7. Once the machine restarts, it will present you with a login screen. Type in the login as "root" and password as "toor". You should now be logged into your installed version of BackTrack. Congratulations!

I will be changing the desktop theme and some settings for this book. Feel free to use your own themes and color settings!

What just happened?

We have successfully installed BackTrack on the laptop! We will use this laptop as the penetration tester's laptop for all other experiments in this book.

Have a go hero – installing BackTrack on Virtual Box

We can also install BackTrack within virtualization software such as Virtual Box. For readers who might not want to dedicate a full laptop to BackTrack, this is the best option. The installation process of BackTrack in Virtual Box is exactly the same. The only difference is the pre-setup, which you will have to create in Virtual Box. Have a go at it! You can download Virtual Box from http://www.virtualbox.org.

One of the other ways we can install and use BackTrack is via USB drives. This is particularly useful if you do not want to install on the hard drive but still want to store persistent data on your BackTrack instance, such as scripts and new tools. We would encourage you to try this out as well!