WiFi Pentesting with Airodump-ng

by Juan Morales

Free Internet!

Well, not really……The purpose of this article is to demonstrate different forms of Wi-Fi network attacks (with permission of course!) using none other than the Aircrack Suite. We will cover a slew of different attacks and capabilities of the Aircrack Suite. For the purposes of demonstration, I will be using an Alfa AWUS036ACH Wi-Fi USB adaptor though you can use any compatible wireless network adaptor that supports monitor and AP modes as well as packet injection. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and demonstrate how we can test different Wi-Fi standards.

Pre-Connection

Before capturing WPA handshakes for the purpose of cracking the password, we are going to go over two attacks (packet sniffing and deauthentication). Within the Aircrack Suite there is a tool named Airodump-ng. Airodump-ng serves as a packet sniffer, it also helps in attaining information regarding the networks in our vicinity and can even tell us information about the clients connected to those networks. In order to start using Airodump, we must first set our Wi-Fi adaptor to monitor mode. Monitor mode simply enables the Wi-Fi adaptor to receive different types of Wi-Fi packets, including “Beacon Packets”, which are sent by APs (Access Points) at regular intervals, “Deauthentication Packets”, which essentially reset a client’s network connection, and much more. The ability to receive the host of different packets is what allows Airodump not only to display different APs in the vicinity but also....