The use of the internet has increased at a high rate in the past decades. Most people depend on the internet for various things and this is becoming advantageous for the malicious attackers. The attackers or hackers misuse the internet to steal the personal information of people and use it for their own benefit. They hack the android devices, computer systems, websites of others to trouble people and use it for profitable purposes.

What is Wi-Fi Hacking?

Wi-Fi hacking is the process of exploiting vulnerabilities in wireless networks to obtain unauthorized access or compromise security. This practice can be performed for ethical purposes such as penetration testing and security auditing or for malicious reasons such as stealing data, launching attacks, etc. Hence, it is crucial to understand how Wi-Fi hacking works for individuals and organizations to secure their networks effectively.

How Does Wi-Fi Hacking Work?

WiFi hacking generally involves several techniques and tools to bypass security measures like passwords and encryption. Some common methods are briefly explained below:

• Cracking Weak Passwords- Attackers use brute-force or dictionary attacks to guess weak Wi-Fi passwords.
• Packet Sniffing- Cybercriminals capture unencrypted network traffic to extract sensitive data.
• Evil Twin Attacks- Hackers set up rogue access points that mimic legitimate networks, tricking users into connecting.
• De-Authentication Attacks- Attackers forcefully disconnect users from a network, which promotes them to reconnect to a rogue access point.
• Exploiting WPS Vulnerabilities- The Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) feature can sometimes be exploited to gain unauthorized access to a network.

Which of The Following Tools are Used in Wi-Fi Hacking?

Ethical hackers and cyber security professionals use WiFi penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities before malicious actors exploit them. Here are some popular WiFi hacking tools:

• Aircrack-ng- This tool is used to crack WEP and WPA/WPA2 keys.
• Wireshark- This tool is a powerful packet analyzer for monitoring network traffic.
• Kali Linux- This is a security-focused operating system with various Wi-Fi hacking tools.
• Reaver- This tool is used to exploit WPS vulnerabilities.

How Does Wi-Fi Assist the Attackers To Exploit?

Wireless networks, especially the public wireless networks are more prone to security dangers. Often the big businesses offer free public networks for the convenience of the consumers, but the security in these networks is most likely to be weak. This leads the malicious attackers to use the network and get access into the devices of the users. In the late 1990s, mobile hotspots have been proven infamously unsafe.  

The Wi-Fi Secured Access (WPA) standard, which was established by the Wi-Fi Affiliation, represented as a temporary fix to well WEP attack vectors, until IEEE released the 802.11i standard. This is now the approved Standard specification that includes the WPA patches for WEP, as well as various cryptographic procedures to make wireless networks even more secure.

Most Common Attacks Performed By Attackers

• Jamming Signals
• Unencrypted Networks
• Malware Distribution
• Misconfiguration Attack
• Sniffing and Snooping
• Malicious Hotspots

Techniques for Wi-Fi Hacking

One of the most well-known techniques is brute-forcing, when it comes to gaining access. When nothing seems to work anymore and rightfully, brute-force can be used in such cases. Most of the network devices and applications lack the resilience to effectively detect and prevent brute-force attacks, it comes as an effective attack. 

How To Perform Brute-Force Attack?

A virtual machine with Kali Linux and an external Wi-Fi adapter is required, as virtual machines are bridged to the adapter specified and won’t detect the WLAN interface.

Assuming that the Wi-Fi interface is Wlan0, the command is:

airmon-ng start wlan0

Next, you will have to scan for the access point. If you check your interfaces with the iwconfig command, now you will see your Wlan0 has been transformed to Wlan0mon. Now you can scan the access point around us

airodump-ng wlan0mon

This should start scanning for Access Point’s SSIDs and BSSIDs (Basic service set identifiers or simply a 48 bit MAC) around you. 

On the top left you see CH3 written. That is a Wi-Fi channel. A Wi-Fi channel is a path on which Wi-Fi packets travel to and from your device to the access point

A 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi uses 11 channels and a 5 GHz Wi-Fi uses 45 channels. The channel may vary on what the vendor may use- higher or lower channel size is possible but generally is under 00 MHz in width. Your Wi-Fi access point uses a specified channel to transmit data. This channel to transmit can be manually configured in access points.

Now that you have the target, you will capture a handshake (an access point that authenticates a client to onboard it and use its services). The goal is to capture this handshake file (.cap file), extract fresh information and brute force against the MIC to finally obtain a password. Since MIC is analogous to a hash in Wi-Fi, you need a dictionary to calculate hashes and compare against the value given in the handshake capture and confirm the password.

In order to better develop the penetration test and crack the wireless network password, it is important to build a powerful dictionary and have a good dictionary, which will bring convenience to the cracking work.

How To Protect Your Digital Personal Information?

Since the public networks can be vulnerable and can be used for exploitation by hackers, it is important to protect your personal information online.

Protect your online accounts and devices

Always set a strong password and turn on two-factor authentication when it is available. When you use a computer to log into the accounts, make sure your security software, operating system and internet browser are up to date. Keep updated the phone’s operating system too.

Recognize scammers

Scammers are those who pretend to be someone else, like a representative from a well-known company or government, to steal your personal information. They create phishing websites and encrypt them to make you think they’re safe, but in reality they’re not. If you step into a scammer’s website, your data may be encrypted on its way to the site, but it won’t be safe from scammers operating the site.

How To Improve The Security Of Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi uses wireless channels to transmit information, the signal is easier to capture together with the existence of a number of vulnerabilities in the protocol. The commonly used encryption modes of Wi-Fi cannot guarantee its absolute security. There are several ways to enhance its security:

1. Modify the default password of the administrator of the router. The default password is admin. It is advised to change the password to a complex password of 12 characters or longer to avoid the administrator password being guessed.
2. Turn off QSS and adopt a relatively secure authentication encryption mode. It is recommended to use the WPA2+AES authentication encryption method with higher security.
3. Set the MAC address filtering.
4. Disable SSID broadcasting.
5. Turn off the Wlan automatic connection function.
6. An open network that is connected at will.
7. Set a long and complicated Wi-Fi- password.
8. Enhance the awareness of prevention, strengthen network supervision, improve network anomaly detection and intrusion, detection capabilities and open logs, and so forth.

Conclusion

As evidenced, any wireless network can be attacked in several ways. Potential vulnerabilities include using the default SSID or password, WPS pin authentication, inadequate access control, and leaving the access point accessible in unlocked locations. This can lead to data theft of critical information. Various security practices, discussed above, can be used by the user to safeguard his information. Ethical hacking is the practice of identifying problems in a service, system or institution’s infrastructure that may be prone to malicious code. The malicious attackers legitimately break into networks and search for weaker points, to employ this approach to avoid invasions and privacy violations.

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