WiFi Hacking Basics Part 1

If your are reading this you must have used WiFi at-least once or may be you have your own WiFi network at home.WiFi is cool and hacking WiFi is a lot  more interesting. Here i am gonna tell you the basics of Wireless Network and how it is hacked so that you get a grasp of what is going on with your WiFi.

You can try yourself this attacks for this

What will you need ,

• Laptop with Backtrack installed or Backtrack in VW.
• Access Point(AP)
• USB WiFi Adapter Card which support packet injection(I recommend Alpha Card)
• A Smartphone or another laptop with WiFi (as a Victim)

For those who don't know Backtrack,its a Pentest Linux Distro with all tools necessary.Access point can be any SOHO WiFi router.USB WiFi Adapter is for packet injection because normal Laptop WiFi card chip-set don't support Packet Injection.

So lets get started with basics or theory.

Normally your WiFi card sniff all wireless network around it but only accepts packets destined to it if its connected to it at all. AP (Access Point) is broadcasting networks SSIDs all the time. SSID means name given to wireless network.This network can be open or closed.Open network don't require any authentication on the other hand closed network require a shared key to connect to it.

So how to sniff which which network are there?

For this we use a tool in Backtrack called Aircrack-ng suite.To sniff the packets we create a virtual interface called Moniter Mode Interface (mon 0).Mon 0 is created on top wireless interface on your laptop,say wlan 0.

First task would be to create Mon 0.

Go to backtrack open terminal type airmon-ng start wlan0 

now mon0 is created, to verify it type in terminal ifconfig  you will notice mon0 interface and MAC address same as your wifi card.

Now there is another tool we are going to use to see actual packets Wireshark.Next step fire  up Wireshark by typing wireshark & on  terminal.You will see in interface mon0 listed start capture on mon0.

then you will see lots of packets if there is any WiFi connection  in your vicinity,if you don't see  any traffic create a network using your AP and check the SSIDs.

What we learned : How to create mon0 and sniff traffic.

Contd.. part 2