Anyone who is inside the wireless network's transmission radius has access to that Wireless Network, and if the Wireless Network doesn't have proper security measures in place, then its prone to attacks. In areas such as airports, restaurants, etc. hotspots are available, which are generally Public Hotspots, or asks for an OTP sent to your Mobile phone for allowing you to access the Network, these networks are also not safe.
In this article, we will share with you some of 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, and prevent unauthorised WiFi access and protect your network from attacks.
So let's learn How to hack wifi password, and How to secure your wifi so that no one can hack your wifi password.
How to connect to a Wifi?
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?
Time to learn some basic concepts around Wifi security and vulnerabilities.
1. 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:
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Passive cracking: This is quite difficult to detect. It has no effect on the traffic of the network til the WEP security has been cracked.
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Active cracking: This increases the load on the traffic. Compared to passive cracking, this can be easily detected. It is also more effective than passive cracking.
Here are some tools that you can use for WEP cracking:
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Aircrack: This is a network sniffer and a WEP cracker.
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WEPCrack: This here is an open-source( unpaid ) WEP hacker who cracks the 802.11 WEP secret keys. FMS attack is implemented through this.
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Kismet: It detects the wireless networks which are visible as well as the hidden, sniffer packets and also detects intrusions.
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WebDecrypt: It uses active dictionary attacks to break the WEP keys. It has key generators of its own and it implements packet filters for hacking WiFi passwords.
2. 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.
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CowPatty: This tool is mainly used while cracking pre-shared keys (PSK) using force.
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Cain & Abel: This tool is used to decode the capture files from different sniffing programs like Wireshark. The files that are captured might contain WEP or WPA-PSK encoded frames.
The Different Types Of Attacks
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Sniffing: Sniffing involves the intercepting of packets as they are transmitted over a network. Then the captured data is decoded using tools such as Cain and Abel.
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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 your Wireless Network?
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
It's time to try and hack Wifi Password using Windows system.
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
End Note
I hope this article helped you understand a lot of things around the Wifi security, and how can wifi security be breached. If you have a Wifi, you must secure it using a complex password. If you are visiting Airport and want to use any public wifi, I would suggest avoid it. But if you have to use it, use some good VPN service.
