Hacking into your neighbor’s wifi network may be easier than you think—and, conversely, your neighbor may think it’s easy to hack into your network. Considering that the police are going to blame you for any activity which happens on your Internet connection, keeping wifi trespassers off your network is very important, so here are five ways to hack into a neighbor’s network that might be used against you.
- Right click the desired network and click on copy MAC Address. Switch to the Rules tab on the top. On the left hand side choose MAC Addresses. The signal strength is very important because the stronger the signal the quicker you will be able to crack WiFi password with less amount of IV's. If the WiFi signal is weak the captured data is.
- 5 Ways To Hack Into Your Neighbor’s Wifi Network November 9, 2014 by Mitz Hacking into your neighbor’s wifi network may be easier than you think—and, conversely, your neighbor may think it’s easy to hack into your network.
Further, for Wifi, wouldn't it be logical to record the MAC codes of computers trying to access the network and if one you don't recognize is frequently trying to access the system, simply block it. It's not foolproof. Actually it probably is. Do you need to get a Wi-Fi password but don't have the time to crack it? In previous tutorials, I have shown how to crack WEP, WPA2, and WPS, but some people have complained that cracking WPA2 takes too long and that not all access points have WPS enabled (even though quite a few do). The article isn't about getting your Internet by wifi; it's about the wireless router that's inside the cable modem, or the router you've attached to the cable modem, being insecure - if you have WiFi turned on at all (to connect a PC, a laptop, a Wifi-connected TV or DVD player, or a game console), you're probably vulnerable. Clearly, with access to a password database offline, an attacker can attempt to crack a password much more easily. They do this via “ brute-forcing ” — literally attempting to guess many different possibilities and hoping one will match.
Wifi Network Hack #1—The Open Network
In the early days of wifi, almost all networks were open networks—which meant any wireless device could connect to them. This was quite convenient, as no set up is required to connect to an open network so you could share your internet connection if required. Many routers even today come setup by default as open networks, so unless your neighbor has changed his settings, you may be able to immediately connect to his network. We might not want to hack into the neighbors internet, but sometimes it is there for the taking.
The only thing preventing someone from connecting to an open network is range—wifi routers typically have a range of only a few hundred feet (or less if too many walls are involved), so connecting to your neighbor’s network may be difficult in rural areas or some suburban areas when homes are far apart.
However, wifi hackers (sometimes called wardrivers) have long used directional antennas and signal amplifiers to overcome typical range limitations. Although a consumer laptop and a consumer wifi router have a maximum expected range of about 1,500 feet (500 meters), hackers can use special (but inexpensive) equipment to connect to networks up to 20 miles (30 kilometers) away. So even if you live in the wilds of Alaska, your neighbor might be able to hack your open wifi network.
Wifi Network Hack #2—Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP)
When wifi routers first came out, manufacturers knew that some people would want security, so they added the Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) which was supposed to keep neighbors and other attackers out of your network. However, WEP was poorly designed and it turned out that anyone who could monitor your wireless communication for a few hours could break WEP.
Later, hackers discovered a way to send bad packets to your network that would make hacking WEP even faster—today, a hacker using a freeware program and a standard laptop can hack a WEP connection in two to five minutes.
WEP is still installed on the majority of routers, although it’s rarely enabled by default. On older routers, it may be the only security option. It’s better than an open connection, but it should not be considered actual security. (Use WPA2 instead if it’s available on your router.)
Wifi Network Hack #3—Wifi Protected Access (WPA) PINs
The replacement for WEP was WPA, which included several different protocols for extra flexibility. The two most commonly used protocols are WPA Pre-Shared Keys (PSK) and WPA push-button authentication. Both of these remain secure. However, a third protocol was the PIN method, where you would choose (or have chosen for you) a short number-only pin that you could enter into devices you wanted to connect to the network.
Hackers discovered they could brute-force the PIN—that is, they could simply try each combination one after another until they found the correct PIN for your network. The process might take from one minute to nearly an entire day, but eventually they’d get the right combination.
This is a perfect attack for a neighbor since he can run it for as long as it takes—he’s not going anywhere.
There’s no defense against the PIN attack except to make sure you disable PIN authentication on your wireless router. You can use the other WPA methods securely—but read the following section.
Wifi Network Hack #4—Weak WPA Pre-Shared Keys (PSKs)
Probably the most commonly-used wifi security method today, WPA-PSK (or WPA2-PSK) lets you enter a password on the Settings screen of your router and then enter that same password on your devices to allow them to securely connect to your wifi connection. This is easy and very secure—if you use a strong password.
Of course, if you’ve read the news lately, many people don’t use secure passwords. For example, one study found that nearly 50% of people used one of the top 100 passwords on a particular website—passwords like “password”, “password1”, “1234”, and so on. See these different ways obtain a WiFi password.
Known passwords and short passwords are called “weak passwords” in security research because they’re easy to break using the same brute-force method used against WPA PINS—basically an attacker keeps trying weak password after weak password until he finds your password.
Again, this is a perfect attack for a neighbor because he can use freeware software to run his computer 24/7 trying to break into your router. If you use a weak password, he will almost certainly succeed eventually.
The solution for this is simple: use a strong password—a password that’s is at least 8 characters, isn’t a word or name, and which includes some numbers or special characters. To allow me to use a strong password and not inconvenience guests, I have a sticky note on top of my router with my network password on it. This allows guests inside my home to simply walk up to the router and enter the password—but it prevents neighbors or anyone else from getting my password.
Wifi Network Hack #5—The Last Resort: Jamming
If you do everything right to secure your network, there’s nothing your neighbor can do to break your security—except convince you not to use it. Using a standard laptop or reprogrammable router, your neighbor can use a program that will jam your router any time you attempt to use a secure protocol. You won’t be able to tell that you’re being jammed, but you will notice that you either can’t connect to to your network any more or that it runs very slow.
If you stop using security and re-enable open networking, the jamming will stop, possibly leading you to believe that it’s your security that’s broken. In the mean time, your neighbor will be using your open wifi network.
The only defense against this is to have a radio communications expert diagnose your connection problem as jamming. Jamming—like all the hacks described here—is illegal, and if you demonstrate that you’re being jammed while a police officer watches, your neighbor will probably be fined. (Jail time for jamming is rare, but fines for jamming in the U.S. can be several hundred thousand dollars, making it one of the most expensive “minor” offenses.)
Conclusion
To improve your wireless network security, use WPA security with PSK and a strong password, or use WPA with push-button security. Remember to disable WEP and WPA-PIN, and if you have connection problems related to security, don’t take them at face value. Anything else may allow your neighbor to hack your wifi connection.
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Last year, I wrote an article covering popular wireless hacking tools to crack or recover password of wireless network. We added 13 tools in that article which were popular and work great. Now I am updating that post to add few more in that list.
I will not explain about wireless security and WPA/WEP. You can read the existing article on wireless hacking tools to learn about them. In this post, I am updating the existing list to add few more powerful tools. I am adding seven new tools in the existing list to give you a single list of the most used wireless cracking tools.
1. Aircrack
Aircrack is the most popular and widely-known wireless password cracking tool. It is used as 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking tool around the globe. It first captures packets of the network and then try to recover password of the network by analyzing packets. It also implements standard FMS attacks with some optimizations to recover or crack password of the network. optimizations include KoreK attacks and PTW attack to make the attack much faster than other WEP password cracking tools. This tool is powerful and used most widely across the world. This is the reason I am adding it at the top of the list.
It offers console interface. If you find this tool hard to use, you can try the available online tutorials. Company behind this tool also offers online tutorial to let you learn by yourself.
Download: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/
2. AirSnort
How To Crack Neighbors Wifi
AirSnort is another popular wireless LAN password cracking tool. It can crack WEP keys of Wi-Fi802.11b network. This tool basically operates by passively monitoring transmissions and then computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. This tool is freely available for Linux and Windows platform. It is also simple to use. The tool has not been updated for around three years, but it seems that company behind this tool is now interested in further development. This tool is also directly involved in WEP cracking and hence used widely.
Download AirSnort: http://sourceforge.net/projects/airsnort/
3. Kismet
Kismet is another Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n layer 2 wireless network sniffer and intrusion detection system. This tool is basically used in Wi-Fi troubleshooting. It works fine with any Wi-Fi card supporting rfmon mode. It is available for Windows, Linux, OS X and BSD platforms. This tool passively collects packets to identify standard network and also detects the hidden networks. Built on a client server modular architecture, this tool can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, and 802.11n traffic. It is an open source tool and supports recent faster wireless standards.
Download Kismet: http://www.kismetwireless.net/download.shtml
4. Cain & Able
Cain & Able is another popular tool used for cracking wireless network passwords. This tool was developed to intercept the network traffic and then use the brute forcing to discover the passwords. This is why this tool helps a lot while finding the password of wireless network by analyzing the routing protocols. This tool can also be used to crack other kind of passwords. It is one of the most popular password cracking tools.
This tool is not just for WEP cracking but various other features are also there. It is basically used for Windows password cracking. This is the reason this tool is so popular among users.
Download Cain & Able: http://www.oxid.it/cain.html
5. WireShark
WireShark is a very popular tool in networking. It is the network protocol analyzer tool which lets you check different things in your office or home network. You can live capture packets and analyze packets to find various things related to network by checking the data at the micro-level. This tool is available for Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and other platforms.
If you are thinking to try this tool, I recommend you to first read about networking and protocols. WireShark requires good knowledge of network protocols to analyze the data obtained with the tool. If you do not have good knowledge of that, you may not find this tool interesting. So, try only if you are sure about your protocol knowledge.
Wireshark does is one of the most popular tool in networking and this is why it was included in this list in higher position.
Download Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/
6. Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker
Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker is another nice tool which helps with network security. It lets you see real-time network traffic and identify hosts. Basically this tool was developed to find flaws in computer networks and fixes the detected flaws. It is available for Apple, Windows and Linux platforms.
it is able to crack and recover WEP/WPA/WPS keys easily. It can also run other network based attacks on wireless or Ethernet based networks. For cracking WPA/WPA2, it uses WPS based on dictionary based attacks. For WEP cracking, it uses Fragmentation, Chop-Chop, Caffe-Latte, Hirte, ARP Request Replay or WPS attack.
This tool is in active development. SO, you can expect timely update with new features. Pro version of the tool is also available which offers much features.
Download Fern WiFi Wireless cracker: http://www.fern-pro.com/downloads.php
7. CoWPAtty
CoWPAtty is another nice wireless password cracking tool. It is an automated dictionary attack tool for WPA-PSK to crack the passwords. It runs on Linux OS and offers a less interesting command line interface to work with. It runs on a word-list containing thousands of password to use in the attack. If the password is in the password’s word-list, this tool will surely crack the password. But this tool is slow and speed depends on the word list and password’s strength. Another reason for slow process is that the hash uses SHA1 with a seed of SSID. It means the same password will have a different SSIM. So, you cannot simply use the rainbow table against all access points. So, the tool uses the password dictionary and generates the hash for each word contained in the dictionary by using the SSID. This tool is simple to use with available commands.
With the newer version of the tool CoWPAtty tried to improve the speed by using a pre-computed hash file to avoid the computation at the time of cracking. This pre-computed file contains around 172000 dictionary file for around 1000 most popular SSIDs. But for successful attack, your SSID must be in that list. If your SSID is not in those 1000, you are unlucky. Still, you can try this tool to see how it works.
Download CoWPAtty: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cowpatty/
8. Airjack
Airjack is a Wi-Fi 802.11 packet injection tool. It is used to perform DOS attack and MIM attack. This wireless cracking tool is very useful in injecting forged packets and making a network down by denial of service attack. This tool can also be used for a man in the middle attack in the network. This tool is popular and powerful both.
Download AirJack: http://sourceforge.net/projects/airjack/
9. WepAttack
WepAttack is another working open source Linux tool for breaking 802.11 WEP keys. Like few other tools in the list, this tool also performs an active dictionary attack. It tests millions of words from its dictionary to find the working key for the network. Only a working WLAN card is required to work with WepAttack to perform the attack. Limited usability but works awesome on supported WLAN cards.
Download WepAttack: http://wepattack.sourceforge.net/
10. NetStumbler
NetStumbler is another wireless password cracking tool available only for Windows platform. It helps in finding open wireless access points. This tool is freely available. Basically NetStumbler is used for wardriving, verifying network configurations, finding locations with a poor network, detecting unauthorized access points, and more.
This tool is not very effective now. Main reason is that last stable release of the tool was back in April 2004 around 11 years ago. So, it does not work with 64-bit Windows OS. It can also be easily detected with most of the wireless intrusion detection systems available. So, you can use this tool for learning purpose on home network to see how it works.
A trimmed down version dubbed as ‘MiniStumbler’ of the tool is also available. This tool is too old but it still works fine on supported systems. So, I included it in this list.
Download NetStumbler: http://www.stumbler.net/
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⇒ Attacking wireless networks
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⇒ And more
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11. inSSIDer
inSSIDer is one of the most popular Wi-Fi scanner for Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms. This tool was released under open source license and also awarded as “Best Open Source Software in Networking”. Later it became premium tool and now costs $19.99. The inSSIDer Wi-Fi scanner can do various tasks, including finding open Wi-Fi access points, tracking signal strength, and saving logs with GPS records. Basically this tool is used by network administrators to find the issues in the wireless networks
Download inSSIDer: http://www.inssider.com/
12. Wifiphisher
Wifiphisher is another nice hacking tool to get password of a wireless network. This tool can execute fast automated phishing attack against a Wi-Fi wireless network to steal passwords. This tool comes pre-installed on Kali Linux. It is free to use and is available for Windows, MAC and Linux.
Download and read more about WiFiphisher:
https://github.com/sophron/wifiphisher
https://github.com/sophron/wifiphisher
13. KisMac
KisMac is tool very much similar to Kismet, we added in the list above. It offers features similar to Kismet and is used as wireless network discovery hacking tool. As the name suggests, this tool is only available for Mac. It scans for networks passively only on supported wireless cards and then try to crack WEP and WPA keys by using brute force or exploiting any flaw.
Download KisMac:
http://kismac-ng.org/
http://kismac-ng.org/
14. Reaver
Reaver is an open-source tool for performing brute force attack against WPS to recover WPA/WPA2 pass keys. This tool is hosted on Google Code and may disappear soon if developer has not migrated it to another platform. It was last updated around 4 years ago. Similar to other tools, this tool can be a good alternate to other tools in the list which use same attack method.
Download Reaver:
https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/downloads/list
https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/downloads/list
15. Wifite
Wifite is also a nice tool which supports cracking WPS encrypted networks via reaver. It works on Linux based operating systems. It offers various nice features related to password cracking.
Download Wifite: https://github.com/derv82/wifite
We have a complete article on Wifite. Read wifite walkthrough.
16. WepDecrypt
WepDecrypt is another wireless LAN tool written in C language. This tool can guess the WEP keys by performing dictionary attack, distributed network attack, key generator and some other methods. This tool needs few libraries to work. You can read more details on the download page. Tool is not so popular but it is good for beginners to see how dictionary attack works.
Download and read more about WepDecrypt:
http://wepdecrypt.sourceforge.net/wepdecrypt-manual.html
http://wepdecrypt.sourceforge.net/wepdecrypt-manual.html
17. OmniPeek
OmniPeek is a packet sniffer and network packets analyzer tool. This tool is only available for Windows platform and is available for commercial use only. It also requires you to have good knowledge of network protocols and understanding of network packets. It works with most of the network interface cards available in market. With available plugins, this tool can become more powerful. Around 40 plugins are already available to extend the functions of this tool.
Download OmniPeek: http://www.wildpackets.com/products/distributed_network_analysis/omnipeek_network_analyzer
18. CloudCracker
CloudCracker is an online password cracking tool to crack WPA keys of Wireless network. This tool can also be used to crack various other kind of password hashes. You only need to upload the handshake file and enter the network name to start the attack. With 3000 million words long dictionary, this tool is most likely to crack the password. This tool is also used for MD5, SHA and few other cracking. It is also an effective tool and worth to mention if we talk about wireless cracking tools.
See CloudCracker: https://crack.sh/
19. CommonView for Wi-Fi
CommonView for Wi-Fi is also a popular wireless network monitor and packer analyzer tool. It comes with easy to understand and use GUI to work with. This tool is basically for Wi-Fi network admins and security professionals who want to monitor and troubleshoot network related problems. It works fine with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac networks. It captures every single packet and lets you see useful information of the network. You can also get useful information like protocol distribution, access points, signal strength and more. This tool offers key information about a network and has a good value for network admins.
Download CommonView: http://www.tamos.com/products/commwifi/
20. Pyrit
Pyrit is also a very good tool which lets you perform attack on IEEE 802.11 WPA/WPA2-PSK authentication. This tool is available for free and is hosted on Google Code. SO, it could be disappearing in coming months. It works on range of platforms including FreeBSD, MacOS X and Linux.
It performs brute-force attack to crack the WPA/WPA-2 passwords. It is very effective and I recommend you to try it once. Due to its effectiveness, it was necessary to mention this tool in this list.
Download Pyrit:
https://code.google.com/p/pyrit/
https://code.google.com/p/pyrit/
Ethical Hacking Training
Learn how to attack wireless networks
Learn about exploiting wireless networks, including protocols, Wi-Fi authentication and weak points.
This skills course also covers
This skills course also covers
⇒ Tools and techniques used to break into passwords
⇒ Attacking wireless networks
⇒ And more
⇒ Attacking wireless networks
⇒ And more
Start your free trial
Final words
In this post, I added twenty working wireless cracking tools available for free or in open source licenses. You can try these tools to get access to a wireless network without knowing its password. Most of the tools are capable of cracking wireless network passwords but password cracking time may vary depending on the password’s complexity and length. Few tools cannot be directly used in cracking wireless passwords but packet analysis helps in guessing password.
I also recommend the use of these tools just for learning purpose. We do not encourage illegal activities and do not support these kind of people. Hacking wireless network to get unauthorized access is a cyber-crime. So, do not put yourself into a risk.
If you are into network security profession, you must know about these tools.
I tried my best to provide most of the available popular wireless hacking tools. If you have any suggestion, you can comment below to suggest us.