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)

Configuring initial wireless security


In the last chapter, we discussed how an attacker can break into a wireless network. Now that we have discussed this process and methodology, we will look at securing our wireless networks from attacks.

The first steps in the methodology that we discussed were probing and network discovery. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, it is difficult to prevent this because we need to have our networks available. Having said that, there are things we can do to limit our "visibility" when it comes to wireless networks.

Unless you need to broadcast your wireless network out to the public, there is no need to transmit your signals at full power. Not all access points will have the option to reduce the transmission power, but it is worth looking into, to see if yours supports it.

The majority of access points will have a web-based interface that you can use to configure information about the network. To access it is a simple matter of opening a browser and entering...