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)

Working with tools


The next tool we want to work with is the airodump-ng tool. This is another powerful tool with many features that is available within Backtrack. We will look at this tool in more detail in the next chapter, but for now we will use it within the context of surveying our wireless zone. Go to Applications | Backtrack | Information Gathering | Wireless Analysis | WLAN Analysis | airodump-ng.

Once the window opens, enter the following command:

root@bt:~# airodump-ng mon0

This should result in a window that will display information about the access points that are being detected by the card. An example of this is shown in the next screenshot:

As you can see from the screenshot, the output is similar to that of the ssidsniff tool. One of the features that airodump-ng has is, it can be used with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver; it will then display the coordinates of the discovered access points. In the previous screenshot, all of the access points that have been discovered...