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 using iwconfig


The next thing we want to do is to look at the iwconfig tool. In your terminal window, enter iwconfig:

root@bt:~# iwconfig

A sample output of this command is shown in the following screenshot; it shows that there are no wireless cards currently recognized on this machine.

At this time, you are probably wondering what we have to do to get the card recognized? Unfortunately, if the card is not one among those that are recommended, it can become a daunting task. So, we will try a few more things before we reveal the guaranteed way to get a wireless card that we know will work within the BackTrack distribution.

When you are in a virtual environment, you can see whether the device is listed or just not connected. We do this by clicking on Removable Devices under the VM menu. This will bring up a list of removable devices found on the machine, which is displayed in the following screenshot:

The process now is to connect each device by selecting the available...