How to Use Aircrack-ng

Most of the time, people never think about the network to which they are connected. They never think how secure that network is and how much they risk their confidential data on a daily basis. You can run vulnerability checks on your wifi networks by using a very powerful tool called Aircrack-ng and Wireshark. Wireshark is used to monitor network activity. Aircrack-ng is more like an aggressive tool that lets you hack and give access to Wireless connections. Thinking as an intruder has always been the safest way to protect yourself against a hack. You might be able to grasp the exact actions that an intruder will take to obtain access to your system by learning about aircrack. You can then conduct compliance checks on your own system to ensure that it is not insecure.

Aircrack-ng is a full set of software designed to test WiFi network security. It is not just a single tool but a collection of tools, each of which performs a particular purpose. Different areas of wifi security can be worked on, like monitoring the Access Point, testing, attacking the network, cracking the wifi network, and testing it. Aircrack’s key objective is to intercept the packets and decipher the hashes to break the passwords. It supports nearly all the new wireless interfaces. Aircrack-ng is an improved version of an outdated tool suite Aircrack, ng refers to the New Generation. Some of the awesome tools that work together in taking out a bigger task.

Airmon-ng:

Airmon-ng is included in the aircrack-ng kit that places the network interface card in the monitor mode. Network cards will usually only accept packets targeted for them as defined by the NIC’s MAC address, but with airmon-ng, all wireless packets, whether they are targeted for them or not, will be accepted too. You should be able to catch these packets without linking or authenticating with the access point. It is used to check the status of an Access Point by putting the network interface in monitor mode. Firstly one has to configure the wireless cards to turn on the monitor mode, then kill all the background processes if you think that any process is interfering with it. After terminating the processes, monitor mode can be enabled on the wireless interface by running the command below:

You can also disable the monitor mode by stopping the airmon-ng anytime by using the command below:

Airodump-ng:

Airodump-ng is used to list all the networks surrounding us and to view valuable information about them. The basic functionality of airodump-ng is to sniff packets, so it’s essentially programmed to grab all the packets around us while being put in the monitor mode. We will run it against all connections around us and gather data like the number of clients connected to the network, their corresponding mac addresses, encryption style, and channel names and then start targeting our target network.

By typing the airodump-ng command and giving it the network interface name as the parameter, we can activate this tool. It will list all the access points, the amount of data packets, encryption and authentication methods used, and the name of the network (ESSID). From a hacking point of view, the mac addresses are the most important fields.

@UsamaAzad14