The 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 only 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 capturing the data needed to unhide a hidden ESSID, as shown in the following steps:
- At the command line, confirm that wireless is enabled on the attacking system by entering the following command:
root@kali:~# airmon-ng
- Next, use the following ifconfig command to review the available interfaces and to determine the exact...
