**Note: The content in this article is only for educational purposes and understanding of cybersecurity concepts. It should enable people and organizations to have a better grip on threats and know how to protect themselves against them. Please use this information responsibly.**
Aircrack-ng stands out as a well-known and effective toolkit for checking wireless networks. People often use it to break WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK keys, which protect Wi-Fi networks. This set of tools helps to watch, attack, test, and crack wireless networks.
Key Tools in Aircrack-ng:
- Airmon-ng: Turns on monitor mode for wireless interfaces, which is key to catch network packets.
- Airodump-ng: This packet sniffer grabs raw 802.11 frames giving you the full scoop on access points and connected devices.
- Aircrack-ng: This is the go-to tool to break WEP and WPA-PSK keys. It catches packets and uses statistical attacks to do the job.
- Aireplay-ng: A tool that injects packets to help you catch more of them for cracking.
- Airbase-ng: This flexible tool sets up fake access points to target clients.
- Airdrop-ng: This lets you de-authenticate specific clients from certain access points.
WPA/WPA2 cracking
- The first step starts by checking with the wireless adapter available on your system, to do so type the following command:
$ ifconfig
$ airmon-ng
(It will display the wireless card and chipset along with drivers)
- The next step is to use the same wireless access card in monitor mode, in order to do that we need to run the following command.
$ airmon-ng start wlan0
- This will display that our access point has started in monitoring mode, but it is also displaying a warning stating that a few processes (will be listed) can cause trouble. In order to overcome that trouble, we need to kill those processes with the help of the following command:
airmon-ng check kill
- In order to check the available wireless AP’s type the following command.
airodump-ng wlan0mon
Monitoring wireless networks and capturing the packets
Explanation of the terms of output:
BSSID — Mac address of the AP/Router
PWR — Represents the signal power (the less the amount the higher the signals)
CH — The current channel on it is running
ENC — Means encryption is used
CIPHER — Algorithms used for Encryption
ESSID — Name of the AP.
- Dumping packets and capturing handshakes.
airodump-ng wlan0mon –bssid (bssid of the target) -c (channel no.) –write (file which will be containing handshakes)
- Cracking the WPA/WPA2 password for that we are going to use hiddden1-01.cap file
Using the wordlist rockyou.txt to perform a brute force attack
aircrack-ng: 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program
-w: Location of the wordlist file
And as we can see we have cracked the password that is spiderman.
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