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

Evil twin and access point MAC spoofing


One of the most potent attacks on WLAN infrastructures is the Evil Twin. The idea is to basically introduce an attacker-controlled access point in the vicinity of the WLAN network. This access point will advertise the exact same SSID as the authorized WLAN network.

Many wireless users may accidently connect to this malicious access point thinking it is part of the authorized network. Once a connection is established, the attacker can orchestrate a man-in-the-middle attack and transparently relay traffic while eavesdropping on the entire communication. We will look at how a man-in-the-middle attack is done in a later chapter. In the real world, an attacker would ideally use this attack close to the authorized network, so that the user gets confused and accidently connects to his network.

An evil twin having the same MAC address as an authorized access point is even more difficult to detect and deter. This is where access point MAC spoofing comes in! In...