Book Image

BackTrack 5 Cookbook

By : Willie L. Pritchett, David De Smet
Book Image

BackTrack 5 Cookbook

By: Willie L. Pritchett, David De Smet

Overview of this book

<p>BackTrack is a Linux-based penetration testing arsenal that aids security professionals in the ability to perform assessments in a purely native environment dedicated to hacking. BackTrack is a distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution aimed at digital forensics and penetration testing use. It is named after backtracking, a search algorithm.<br /><br />"BackTrack 5 Cookbook" provides you with practical recipes featuring many popular tools that cover the basics of a penetration test: information gathering, vulnerability identification, exploitation, priviledge escalation, and covering your tracks.<br /><br />The book begins by covering the installation of BackTrack 5 and setting up a virtual environment to perform your tests.<br /><br />We then dip into recipes involving the basic principles of a penetration test such as information gathering, vulnerability identification, and exploitation. You will further learn about privilege escalation, radio network analysis, Voice over IP, Password cracking, and BackTrack forensics.<br /><br />"BackTrack 5 Cookbook" will serve as an excellent source of information for the security professional and novice alike.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
BackTrack 5 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cracking a WEP wireless network


Wireless Equivalent Privacy (or WEP as it's commonly referred to) has been around since 1999 and is an older security standard that was used to secure wireless networks. In 2003, WEP was replaced by WPA and later by WPA2. Due to having more secure protocols available, WEP encryption is rarely used. As a matter of fact, it is highly recommended that you never use WEP encryption to secure your network! There are many known ways to exploit WEP encryption and we will explore one of these ways in this recipe.

We will use the Aircrack suite to crack a WEP key. The Aircrack suite (or Aircrack NG as it's commonly referred to) is a WEP and WPA key cracking program that captures network packets, analyzes them, and uses this data to crack the WEP key.

Getting ready

In order to perform the tasks of this recipe, a comfort with the BackTrack terminal windows is required. A supported wireless card configured for packet injection will also be required. In the case of a wireless...