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)

Wireless card modes


At this point, it is important that we establish what we want to accomplish with the BackTrack tool. We really are not interested in using the wireless card to connect to an access point, because what we want to do is to use the card differently. When you connect a wireless card to an access point, you are using one of the modes of the card. That mode is the managed mode, which is the mode that the card is in, as shown earlier. When you want to analyze network traffic (or "sniff", as it is commonly referred to), you put the card in a promiscuous mode. With our wireless cards, we do not call the mode promiscuous; we instead call it the monitor mode. The best way to put a card into the monitor mode is to use a tool, and we will do that in a moment. First off, we will see how to use the BackTrack card to connect to the network, just in case at times you want to be able to do this.

The tool we will use now is the one that is GUI-based. We could do the entire configuration...