Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By : Vivek Ramachandran
Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By: Vivek Ramachandran

Overview of this book

Wireless has become ubiquitous in today’s world. The mobility and flexibility provided by it makes our lives more comfortable and productive. But this comes at a cost – Wireless technologies are inherently insecure and can be easily broken. BackTrack is a penetration testing and security auditing distribution that comes with a myriad of wireless networking tools used to simulate network attacks and detect security loopholes. Backtrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide will take you through the journey of becoming a Wireless hacker. You will learn various wireless testing methodologies taught using live examples, which you will implement throughout this book. The engaging practical sessions very gradually grow in complexity giving you enough time to ramp up before you get to advanced wireless attacks.This book will take you through the basic concepts in Wireless and creating a lab environment for your experiments to the business of different lab sessions in wireless security basics, slowly turn on the heat and move to more complicated scenarios, and finally end your journey by conducting bleeding edge wireless attacks in your lab.There are many interesting and new things that you will learn in this book – War Driving, WLAN packet sniffing, Network Scanning, Circumventing hidden SSIDs and MAC filters, bypassing Shared Authentication, Cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, Access Point MAC spoofing, Rogue Devices, Evil Twins, Denial of Service attacks, Viral SSIDs, Honeypot and Hotspot attacks, Caffe Latte WEP Attack, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Evading Wireless Intrusion Prevention systems and a bunch of other cutting edge wireless attacks.If you were ever curious about what wireless security and hacking was all about, then this book will get you started by providing you with the knowledge and practical know-how to become a wireless hacker.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – configuring your wireless card


We will be using the Alfa wireless card with the penetration tester's laptop.

Please follow these instructions step-by-step to set up your card:

  1. Plug in the card to one of the BackTrack laptop's USB ports and boot it.

  2. Once you log in, open a console terminal and type in iwconfig. Your screen should resemble as follows:

    As you can see, wlan0 is the wireless interface created for the Alfa wireless card. Type in ifconfig wlan0 up to bring the interface up. Then type in ifconfig wlan0 to see the current state of the interface:

  3. The MAC address 00:c0:ca:3e:bd:93 should match the MAC address written under your Alfa card. This is a quick check to ensure that you have enabled the correct interface.

What just happened?

BackTrack ships with all the required drivers for the Alfa card. As soon as the machine booted, the card was recognized and was assigned the network interface wlan0. By default, all network interfaces in BackTrack are disabled on boot. We enabled the interface using the ifconfig command. Now our Alfa card is up and functional!