WiFi Scanning Tools on Ubuntu 14.04

Dear PenTest Readers,
***Today we've got for you new article about WiFi Scanning Tools on Ubuntu 14.04 written by Majdi Chaouachi. We hope you find this informations useful. Enjoy reading!***

Other than airodump-ng from the suite aircrack-ng or Network-Manager/WICD , there is some CLI/Graphical WiFi scanner on Linux that are very usefull from day to day use or from a fun side :) You will find below the most useful tools that I found and that I applied to my Ubuntu box.

Wireshark

I know that this is obvious, but wireshark will remain always the first utility that will help any pentester to analyse the WiFi traffic.

Installing Wireshark on Ubunt 14.04 is a piece of cake. Just type
```
#apt-get update && apt-get install wireshark && wireshark &
```

When wireshark is opened, select your wireless network interface and start it in monitor mode then apply this filter to filter only Beacon frames: "wlan.fc.type_subtype == 0x08"

Just look at SSID and you will find all wireless networks that you card could detect. If you find SSID=Brodcast, it just mean that SSID is hidden (you can disover it with airmodump-ng & aireplay-ng or just by listening passively until a client connect to that network).

IWLIST

This is a built-in command in Linux and it is used to display some additional information from a wireless network interface that is not displayed by iwconfig. It support the switch "scan" which give the list of Access Points and Ad-Hoc cells in range, and optionally a whole bunch of information about them (ESSID, Quality, Frequency, Mode...). The type of information returned depends on what the card supports.

Getting Wifi network list with iwlist can't be easier

iwlist scan [Wifi-Interface]

This last command will display all wifi networks (cells) with their informations

Wavemon

It is a ncurses-based monitoring application for wireless network devices. It plots levels in real-time as well as showing wireless and network related device information.

Installing Wavemon on Ubuntu 14.04
```
#apt-get install wavemon && wavemon &
```

Remember that wavemon need root permission to scan wireless networks. The wavemon interface splits into different "screens". Each screen presents information in a specific manner. For example, the "scan" screen (F3) shows all the WiFi networks.

LinSSID

It is a wireless tool written in C++ and using Qt5. It brings a graphical user interface over the iwlist tool. Basicly, LinSSID displays all the wireless networks available and information about them is a way very similar toInSSIDer on Windows.

Installing LinSSid on Ubuntu 14.04

#add-apt-repository ppa:wseverin/ppa
#apt-get update
#apt-get install -y linssid

Wifite

It is an automated wireless auditor build in Python. It is the easiest one to work with in a WiFi auditing and it is interactive. It uses reaver, pyrit, tshark & cowpatty to attack WEP/WPA/WPS enabled Wifi networks.