Guess who’s learning to hack………. WEP February 6, 2008
Posted by novaaesa in Linux.Tags: hacker, internet, LAN, laptop, school, WEP, wireless
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I was at my brother’s school for a parent-teacher evening last night and I happened to have my laptop with me. I was bored out of my arse, so I cracked open my lappy and was fiddling around with it. I noticed that the school had like 6 different networks all encrypted with WEP. I remembered reading somewhere that WEP was really easy to crack with Linux.
Anyway, that got me thinking about how cool it would be to be a ‘real’ hacker – being able to hack into networks. I spend about half an hour googling and finally came up with a hacking suit called aircrack-ng. I’ve been playing around with it all of today and have almost been able to hack into my own wireless LAN setup I have at home. I have a feeling I’m going to be there soon. xD
Just in case anyone is wondering, I’m only doing this for interest and academic curiosity. I have no intention of stealing anyone’s Internet.
If I do recall correctly, there should be some good applications in the repositories to do this.
Just search for WEP
I found a package in there called airsnort and tried using it but to no avail. Even though it was a GUI app, it still seemed hard to use.
Thanks for the tip xD, but I think I will stick with aircrack-ng. I seems far more powerful and configurable.
Oh, and I feel more like a hacker if I’m using a CLI app
so wep isnt secure at all??
even if you use a 13-character password?
i might consider changing my router to wpa2-psk after that
No WEP is not secure at all. If you have a 5 character password, it means it’s 64-bit WEP, if the password has 13 character’s it means it is 128-bit WEP. The only difference these two differences pose for a hacker is the amount of time it takes to hack. 64-bit can be done in under 15 minutes, and 128-bit in under 30 minutes.
You are much better off if you decide to use WPA or WPA2. As of yet, there is no ‘proper’ method of cracking these. The only way of cracking them is through a dictionary attack. Pretty much, words from a dictionary file are tested (at a rate of about 500 words per second on a modern computer) to see if they are the password. If you choose a ‘good’ password, i.e. one that isn’t in the dictionary and contains lots of UPPER/lower, symbols and numbers, then WPA and WPA2 are practically unbeatable for the amateur hacker.
Thanks for replying, nova.
Yesterday I got myself into the aircracking world, and it was very interesting. I found that ~75% of the APs near my location uses WEP 64 or 128 bits, maybe they dont know that its a unsecure protocol.
I also discovered that many ad-hoc networks near my home were transmitting in channel 2 (is that the default channel for ad-hoc?) and I was able to decode the packets with OmniPeek. I could even see the HTML Data!
Haha it’s astonishing that some people can be that ignorant when it comes to networking security (probably Windows users
).
I have no idea about the channel 2 thing though. Most of the networks I’ve seen around here are on channel 11. Maybe the default is different in different countries (I’m in Australia).
ITS CALLED CRACKING!
GAAAARGH!!!!!!1111oneonehundredandeleven