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)

Exploring devices


The next thing we want to do is explore the wireless networks that are around us. The first tool we will use within BackTrack is not actually a hacking tool, but it does work for surveying the networks around us and identifying our wireless zone. Navigate to Applications | Internet | Wicd Network Manager.

This will open the tool; if you get a bus error, click on OK. The tool should open and present a window similar to the one shown in the next screenshot:

As you can see, the Wicd Network Manager does provide the channel and additional information about the card, so before we go further, we need to discuss what the channels are. In wireless, we have a particular frequency on which the signal is propagated; if everyone is on the same frequency, the result is saturation. So to avoid that, we use different channels for separation and to not overload or saturate a channel. You are probably wondering what channel you should use. Well, this can be a complicated question. This is...