It didn't spell any word either forwards or backwards. I asked the neighbor where he came up with the password. He said it was chosen years ago using an automatic generation feature offered by EarthLink, his ISP at the time. The e-mail address is long gone, the neighbor told me, but the password lives on.
No doubt, this neighbor should have changed his password long ago, but there is a lot to admire about his security hygiene nonetheless. By resisting the temptation to use a human-readable word, he evaded a fair amount of cutting-edge resources devoted to discovering his passcode.
Since the code isn't likely to be included in any password cracking word lists, the only way to crack it would be to attempt every eight-character combination of letters and numbers. Such brute-force attacks are possible, but in the best of worlds they require at least six days to exhaust all the possibilities when using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service.
Besides changing the password every six months or so and not using a digit phone number, my neighbors could have taken another important step to improve their WiFi security.
WPA allows for passwords with 63 characters in them, making it possible to append four or five randomly selected words—"applesmithtrashcancarradar" for instance—that are easy enough to repeat to guests who want to use your wireless network but are prohibitively hard to crack.
Yes, the gains made by crackers over the past decade mean that passwords are under assault like never before. It's also true that it's trivial for hackers in your vicinity to capture the packets of the wireless access point that routes some of your most closely held secrets. But that doesn't mean you have to be a sitting duck. When done right, it's not hard to pick a passcode that will take weeks, months, or years to crack. With odds like that, crackers are likely to move onto easier targets, say one that relies on the quickly guessed "secretpassword" or a well-known Shakespearean quote for its security.
Last edited by awuwish on Tue Aug 28, am. You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Last week's feature explaining why passwords are under assault like never before touched a nerve with many Ars readers, and with good reason. Brother, can you spare a deauth frame? If it is enabled, WPS can be easily cracked within 24 or less in many cases hours by breaking down the 8-character PIN into 2 halves, and cracking those halves.
Universal Plug and Play or UPnP is an easy way to allow devices to find other devices on your network. It can also alter the router to allow devices from other networks to access your device.
However, it has helped hackers to introduce malware and viruses by making them bypass the firewall. Mirai Botnet is an example of one such attack. A guest network has its advantages. It not only provides your guests with a unique SSID and password, but it also restricts outsiders from accessing your primary network where your connected devices work.
Once you have set up a guest network, you will not have to share your primary network password with your guests. They will be unable to access your Internet of Things-enabled devices or infect your network and devices with malware or viruses that may be on their devices. A virtual private network VPN encrypts connections between devices, creating online privacy and anonymity.
VPN services establish secure and encrypted connections to provide greater privacy of the data you send and receive, even on secured Wi-Fi hotspots. A firewall monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and allows or blocks specific traffic. It is an important security feature to look for when selecting a router.
Cybercriminals work tirelessly to gain access to your personal and financial information. A small investment in security software could go a long way. Just a few minutes of selecting the right home Wi-Fi router settings can mean all the difference to your connected world. How To. Join today. Cancel anytime. Start Free Trial. Basic router security Every router should have a strong password to help keep out the bad guys. Once enough packets have been gathered, it tries to recover the password.
To make the attack faster, it implements a standard FMS attack with some optimizations. The company behind the tool also offers an online tutorial where you can learn how to install and use this tool to crack wireless passwords. You can use any of these.
It supports most of the wireless adapters and is almost guaranteed to work. If you are using a Linux distribution, the only drawback of the tool is that it requires deeper knowledge of Linux. If you are not comfortable with Linux, you will find it hard to use this tool. Before you start using this too, confirm that the wireless card can inject packets. Then start WEP cracking.
Read the online tutorial on the website to know more about the tool. If you follow the steps properly, you should be able to successfully crack a Wi-Fi network protected with WEP. Wifite is a Python script designed to simplify wireless security auditing. It runs existing wireless hacking tools for you, eliminating the need to memorize and correctly use the different tools with their various options. Wifite2 is a complete rewrite of the original Wifite tool.
Before running Wifite, it is recommended to install their optional tools as they are essential for running some of the supported attacks.
It passively collects packets being broadcast in its vicinity and analyzes them to detect even hidden Wi-Fi networks. Kismet is supported on all operating systems using WSL on Windows and is actively supported. The last release significantly re-architected the system to improve performance and add new features. Wifiphisher is a tool designed to perform man-in-the-middle attacks by exploiting Wi-Fi association. By convincing wireless users to connect to the rogue access point, Wifiphisher provides an attacker with the ability to intercept and monitor or modify their wireless traffic.
Wifiphisher also enables an attacker to launch web phishing attacks. These can be used to collect user credentials for third-party sites or Wi-Fi network credentials. Additionally, Wifiphisher is designed to be modular, enabling advanced users to write custom code to expand its capabilities.
Basic functionality is available for free, but certain features require a paid membership. Wireshark is the network protocol analyzer. It lets you check what is happening in your network. You can capture packets live and inspect them at a high level or see the values of particular fields within a packet.
Wireshark is designed to be user-friendly but has a great deal of functionality under the hood. It is most useful if you have a strong understanding of network protocols and can effectively interpret the traffic that you are seeing.
It runs on Linux OS. This program has a command-line interface and runs on a word list that contains the password to use in the attack. Using the tool is simple, but it is slow. Perhaps the most predominant flaw in WEP is that the key is not hashed, but concatenated to the IV, allowing completely passive compromise of the network. With WEP, you can literally sit in your car listening for packets on a network. Once you have captured enough of them, you can extract the key and connect to the network.
WPA solves this problem by rotating the key on a per-packet basis, which renders the above method useless. However, nothing is perfectly secure, and WPA-PSK is particularly vulnerable during client association, during which the hashed network key is exchanged and validated in a "four-way handshake". The benefits of this are two-fold. First, this prevents the statistical key grabbing techniques that broke WEP by transmitting the key as a hash cyphertext.
It also makes hash precomputation via a technique similar to Rainbow Tables more difficult because the SSID is used as a salt for the hash. So, like virtually all security modalities, the weakness comes down to the passphrase.
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