Bypassing a hidden SSID

ESSID is the sequence of characters that uniquely identify a wireless local area network. Hiding the ESSID is a poor method of attempting to achieve security through obscurity; unfortunately, the ESSID can be obtained by doing either of the following:

• Sniffing the wireless environment and waiting for a client to associate to a network and then capturing that association
• Actively deauthenticating a client to force the client to associate and then capturing that association

The aircrack tools are particularly well suited to capture the data that’s needed to unhide a hidden ESSID, as shown in the following steps:

1. At the command prompt, confirm that wireless is enabled on the attacking system by entering the following command:

   sudo airmon-ng
   

2. Next, use the following ifconfig command to review the available interfaces and to determine the exact name that’s used by your wireless system: ...