Anyone who is inside the wireless network's transmission radius has access to it. Thus they are prone to attacks. In areas such as airports, restaurants, etc hotspots are available.
Here we will tell you about the common techniques that can be used to exploit weaknesses in the security implementations of WiFi networks. Also, we will talk about some measures to counter these breaches of WiFi access and protect your network from attacks.
How To Access A Wireless Network?
To access a wireless network, you will need a wireless network-enabled device like a laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc. Also, you need to stay within the radius of transmission or range of the wireless network access point. If the WiFi option is turned on, most devices will give you the list of the available networks. The networks which are not protected by a password can be accessed just by clicking. If the network has a password, then you have to find the password to access it.
How to Crack Wifi (Wireless) Networks
WEP cracking
You can exploit the weaknesses in wireless networks and gain unallowed access to the network. This is called cracking. WEP cracking is the exploitation of the WEP networks to implement security controls. Cracking wireless networks can be done, majorly, in two ways:
WEP Cracking (Hacking) Tools
WPA Cracking
For authentications, WPA uses a 256 pre-shared key or passphrase. Mostly, if short passphrases are used, they become vulnerable to dictionary attacks. The mentioned Wifi hacker tools can be used to crack the WPA keys.
The Different Types Of Attacks
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Man in the Middle (MITM) Attack– In this, you basically eavesdrop on a network and absorb all the sensitive information.
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Denial of Service Attack– This attack is mainly to deny the legitimate users, network resources. This type of attack can be performed using FataJack.
Cracking Wireless network WEP/WPA keys
You can crack the WEP/WPA keys and get access to the Wifi network. All you need are the hardware and software resources and some patience. These attacks also depend on the activity of the users of the network to be cracked.
Backtrack is an operating system that is Linux-based and developed on top of Ubuntu. It comes with a number of security tools and can be used to gather information, trace the vulnerabilities and then exploit the network.
Some of the Backtracks popular tools include;
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Metasploit
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Wireshark
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Aircrack-ng
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Nmap
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Ophcrack
At a minimum, you will need the following tools to crack a wireless network.
A Wifi adapter that can inject packets (Hardware)
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Kali Operating System.
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Stay inside the target network’s radius. If the users of the target network are very frequent and active on their network, then you will have considerably more chances to crack it.
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You have to have a basic knowledge of Linux-based operating systems and also a little bit of knowledge about Airrack and its different scripts.
How to Secure wireless networks
An organization can adopt these policies to minimize attacks on wireless networks.
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You should keep changing the default password of the hardware.
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You should enable the authentication mechanism
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You can restrict access to the network by allowing only the registered MAC addresses.
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The use of strong WEP and WPA-PSK keys, and a combination of numbers, symbols and characters make it difficult to crack the network.
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A firewall also helps in reducing the chances to get hacked.
How to Hack WiFi Password
Decoding Wireless network passwords stored in Windows
Step 1) First, you need to download the Cain and Abel tool
Step 2) Click on the Decoders tab and choose wireless networks.
Step 3) The passwords will be shown
Step 4) Now you can get the passwords along with encryption type and SSID