


The data that we get when the airodump command is executed indicates that there is one station ( 40:F0:2F:DC:7A:59) connected to the BSSID ( 84:10:0D:9E:A1:CD) which is in turn associated with the hidden ESSID. In this particular case, we will focus on collecting data from the hidden network on channel 11 using the following command: “ airodump-ng -c 11 wlan0mon”Įxecuting the command removes the output from the multiple wireless sources, and allows the attacker to focus on the target ESSID. Rerun airodump, and filter out everything but the target access point. If clients are present, we will deauthenticate the client, forcing them to send the ESSID when they reconnect to the access point.

What is important is that there may be clients attached to this particular network. The true ESSID length may actually be shorter or longer than 10 characters. The length of the hidden ESSID is identified as being composed of some characters however, this value may not be correct because the ESSID is hidden. Now, use airodump to confirm the available wireless networks, as given in the following command:Īs you can see, the third network’s ESSID is identified only as. If you reconfirm with ifconfig, you will see that there is now a monitoring or wlan0mon address in use. The aircrack tools are particularly well suited to capture the data needed to unhide a hidden ESSID, as shown in the following steps:Īt the terminal, confirm that wireless is enabled on the attacking system by entering the following command:Įnable your wireless interface by entering the following (you may need to replace wlan0 with an available wireless interface that was identified in the previous step): The Alfa cards are readily available online and will support all the tests and attacks delivered using Kali. The most reliable adapters that can be used with Kali are the ALFA NETWORK cards, especially the AWUS036NH adaptors, which support wireless 802.11 b, g, and n protocols. The aircrack-ng site ( contains a list of known compatible wireless adaptors. The injected packets can cause a denial of service, allowing an attacker to capture handshake data needed to crack encryption keys or support other wireless attacks. This is a requirement for attacks that require specific packet types to be injected into the traffic stream between the target and the victim.
#How to crack wifi passwords without being connected to it drivers
It must support the tools that are used, especially the aircrack-ng suite of tools in particular, the card’s chipset and drivers must possess the ability to inject wireless packets into a communication stream. The most important tool in wireless security testing is the wireless adaptor, which connects to the wireless access point. In addition, testers should acquire a strong background in wireless networking before they implement attacks or audit a wireless network. Kali Linux was released with several tools to facilitate the testing of wireless networks however, these attacks require extensive configuration to be fully effective. Actively deauthenticating a client to force the client to associate and then capturing that association.Sniffing the wireless environment and waiting for a client to associate to a network and then capturing that association.Hiding the ESSID is a poor method of attempting to achieve security through obscurity unfortunately, the ESSID can be obtained by: ESSID(Extended Service Set Identifier) is the sequence of characters that uniquely identify a wireless local area network.
