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:
- At the command prompt, 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 name that's used by your wireless system:
root@kali:~# ifconfig
- Enable your wireless interface by entering the following (you may...