How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack

http://lifehacker.com/5305094/how-to-crack-a-wi+fi-networks-wep-password-with-backtrack

by vaksel • 17 years ago

33 8 17 years ago

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Not bad tutorial. It's nice to see she had trouble getting a result: all the vids and tutorials from the backroom hackers usually show it working perfectly each time - which in my experience never happens...

Some tips I've picked up from bitter experience

Always use wesside-ng tool to try it first. It's worth the 20 mins or more it can take for this to fail (because often it will work). Or for best use run it in tandem - your faffing about on the network only generates more traffic.

Use Backtrack 3. v4 is horrid and you cant easily install it onto HDD (which I consider essential for easy use).

Pick your wireless card carefully - it's really worth thinking about it hard. We use Ubiquiti cards which can cost up to $100 but are absolutely fantastic. We have gotten much longer range with these cards than any other. Avoid USB adaptors it usually confuses things.

Use a directional antenna: when your doing this in the same room as the router signal should be stonking. But through several walls and a car windscreen things tend to go very quiet :) A directional antenna (we use two 12x12 inch panels) will increase your sensitivity no end.

Spend time plotting the network. I have never got any of the GPS->Kismet->Map tools to work (gpsdump is the closest I got to working). In the end we now use handy little bluetooh GPS devices coupled with Kismet to drive round and plot data for a bit. Then transfer the data to a windows laptop and use KMS2KML to create actual Google Earth plot files. It's a bit of a pain but tends to be pretty accurate.

I've been playing with a way to grab data off of the kismet server and make the KML file automatically - but it's not so much of a pain for it to be worth the investment.

tsally• 17 years ago

If you didn't already know that WEP was vunerable, you probably shouldn't try anything like this.

In terms of relevant news for this site, attacks against WEP are 8 years old. Why do we care about this anymore? The types of tutorials are a dime a dozen.

skolor• 17 years ago

This was my reaction when I saw the article come up.

Cracking WEP is rather old news. If they were doing an article for any reason other than just trying to drag a few users to their site, they should have done an article on WPA/WPA2 cracking (http://forums.remote-exploit.org/bt4beta-howtos/23208-aircra...) . WEP cracks have been out for a while, CUDA (or the AMD equivelent) cracking is far more recent, and a decent tutorial on it would do a lot of good.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

the demographic for Lifehacker would probably find that a bit hardcore :)

0xdefec8• 17 years ago

I haven't tried it since upgrading to OSX 10.5 but http://trac.kismac-ng.org/ always just worked with the AirPort built into the MBP. With an idiotproof Mac GUI to boot.

buugs• 17 years ago

You don't really need a special wireless adapter I know plenty of people around the college campus that can do this with a laptop with no modifications and a live backtrack cd

The speed depends on how many people are on the network all you really need is one person surfing the web and the network is cracked within a couple minutes otherwise it might take a bit longer

torressr3• 17 years ago

The problem is the wireless adapters that don't have packet injection capability. aircrack won't work without it.

Did any of your colleges did it without a packet injection capable card?

ianbishop• 17 years ago

Somewhat related to this, BackTrack 4 pre-release was made available not too long ago.

While this tutorial is great, there is actually a youtube tutorial which uses SpoonWep. Essentially it is a Java GUI 1-button WEP password grabber which is included with BackTrack 3.

How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack

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