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)

Using Kismet for access point discovery


The next tool we will look at is Kismet. This tool will automatically provide us with the SSID when someone connects to a cloaked network. Go to Applications | Backtrack | Information Gathering | Wireless Analysis | WLAN Analysis | Kismet.

You will get an error, because you first need to start the Kismet server. So what we want to do is start kismet_server. You will get a prompt to start the server; click on Yes. If the prompt does not come up, you can start the server on your own by entering the following command in a terminal window:

root@bt:~# kismet_server -s

You will get a number of errors, mainly because of the GPS; for our purposes, we will ignore them. The next thing you want to do, if you started the server from the terminal window, is quit the client. If you started the server within the GUI, you can skip the next step and remain in the client window. To quit the client, click on Close window under the File menu. Once it has exited, you want...