Book Image

BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security

By : Kevin Cardwell
Book Image

BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security

By: Kevin Cardwell

Overview of this book

Wireless networks are everywhere. You have probably set one up yourself, but have you ever wondered just how safe you are while browsing online? In the majority of cases, the default settings for your networks are not enough to protect you. With your data being transferred over the air, it can be easily plucked and used by anyone who knows how. Don't let it happen to you.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security will help you secure your wireless networks and keep your personal data safe. With this book, you will learn how to configure your hardware for optimum security, find network security holes, and fix them.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security looks at what tools hackers use and shows you how to defend yourself against them. Taking you from no prior knowledge all the way to a fully secure environment, this guide provides useful tips every step of the way. Learn how to select a wireless card to work with the Backtrack tools, run spectrum analysis scans using kismet, set up test networks, and perform attacks against wireless networks. Use the tools aircrack-ng and airodump-ng to crack the wireless encryption used on the network. You will learn everything you need to know to set up your wireless network for use within Backtrack and also how to defend yourself against the included attack tools.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 1. Installing and Configuring BackTrack

In this chapter, we are going to look at the following with respect to using BackTrack:

  • Downloading and configuring BackTrack

  • Installing BackTrack

  • Updating BackTrack

  • Validating the interfaces

  • Customizing Gnome

  • Creating a virtual machine

Before we focus on downloading, installing and configuring Backtrack, I will provide a brief introduction to Backtrack. The BackTrack distribution is actually a combination of two different distributions merged together. There are many distributions that are available, but BackTrack distribution has been created specifically for professional security and penetration testing. The BackTrack distribution was the result of a merger between the two distributions Whax and Auditor. For a brief on some of the distributions, including Auditor, you can find a presentation that I gave at Black Hat in 2005 via this link:

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-05/bh-us-05-cardwell.pdf

The name BackTrack comes from the term backtracking, which is the name of a search algorithm.