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)

Settings that provide protection from masquerade and rogue AP attacks


This brings us to the masquerade and rogue AP attacks. The best defense against these types of attacks is encryption; by this we mean the encryption of the data on your network. This will prevent an attacker from successfully compromising WLAN traffic because it will be encrypted even if they manage to break in to the wireless network. This is best accomplished by setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This is an essential component to deploy when you are connected to wireless hotspots. There are a number of VPN services out there, but before we get into them, we will look at examples with and without a VPN. If you refer to the next screenshot, you will see the network data from a wireless network that is not protected by a VPN.

As you can see, the FTP protocol is clear text, and as such, the data that was entered (that is, the username and password) has been compromised on this network. The way to protect this is...