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)

Detecting the wireless card during the boot process


Now that we have the Gnome desktop started, the next thing we will do is open a terminal window. You can do this by clicking on the shortcut icon, or go the long way by navigating to Application | Accessories | Terminal. The result is that a terminal window opens. In this terminal window, enter the dmesg command.

root@bt:~# dmesg

The result of this command will make you scroll your screen a lot. The dmesg command displays the contents of the ring buffer. Do not worry if you do not know what a buffer is, just think of it as a place used to store data. This ring buffer that is displayed contains the messages that the system displays as it reads and encounters the hardware and devices of your machine. To scroll up and view this would be a bit of a challenge, but the one thing to remember about Linux is that they have devised ways for us to do this much more efficiently. The first method we will look at is the more option; enter the following...