Cracking Wep
I have chosen to try and tell people why it is so important to protect their wireless signal and how easy it is for a person to get into you system if you use the wrong security encryption on your wireless signal. The reading is rather long and for some people just flat not interesting because everyone thinks it can’t happen to them I am hoping after reading this they will see how easy it is and it might help persuade them to pay better attention to their wireless signal.
The Aircrack-ng suite will be what we use. “Aircrack-ng is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured. It implements the standard FMS attack along with some optimizations like KoreK attacks, as well as the all-new PTW attack, thus making the attack much faster compared to other WEP cracking tools. In fact, Aircrack-ng is a set of tools for auditing wireless networks”. You’ll find the entire suite on Backtrack 2 and 3 live CD.
I will start off with hardware. The wireless adapter you chose is very important because the drivers have to be on the live CD and it needs to be compatible with the Aircrack-ng suite and it has to be compatible of monitoring mode. A good example is broadcom wireless adapters which are fully supported by the drivers on the live CD and Aircrack-ng. If you don’t have a Broadcom wireless card then you basically need to look for cards with the Atheros chipset.
Next we move onto software and like I said in the beginning I am using Back Track 3. Next you need to make sure your wireless card is up and running, type in iwconfig in the terminal window. Write down the name of your wireless card for future reference. The name will be ath0 or eth0 or eth1. Now we move onto the steps of actually setting up your wireless card and cracking the WEP key.
Step 1. As mentioned earlier, the WLAN card you use must be capable of being put into "monitor" mode. This means that it can...
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