Hacking: Hacking Practical Guide for Beginners

How to Hack WiFi Networks that Use WEP Encryption
More and more people are using wireless networks. Thus, every hacker needs to know
how to attack this kind of target. In this section, you’ll use Kali Linux to hack a WEP-
encrypted WiFi password.
Important Note: You’re still practicing so don’t use it on other people’s network. It would
be best if you’ll create your own wireless network. There are a lot of videos on YouTube
regarding that task. Watching videos and installing a network is better than getting arrested
for attacking your neighbor’s WiFi. Never forget: unauthorized hacking is illegal.
To hack a WEP-encrypted password, you should do the following:
1. Determine the ID of your computer’s wireless adapter.
Each computer contains multiple network adapters. Your first task is to look for the
wireless adapter and view its name. This step is quick and painless: you just have to open
a terminal, type “
ifconfig
”, and hit the Enter key. Your screen will show you something
like this:
Most computers will give you three adapters: eth, lo, and wlan. For this task, you should
focus on the “wlan” adapter. The image above shows that the name of the wireless adapter
is “wlan1”.
2. Run the Airmon-ng program.
“Airmon-ng” is a part of the “Aircrack-ng” suite. It allows you to generate a monitoring
interface for the attack. To activate this program, just type “
airmon-ng start wlan_ID
”.

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Replace “wlan_ID” with the name of your adapter (e.g. airmon-ng start wlan1”).
Your screen will show you this:
3. Capture data packets from your target network.
Now, you should collect some data packets available in your area. You need to use a tool
called “airodump-ng” for this. Basically, “airodump-ng” (which is another member of the
aircrack-ng suite) looks for data packets and shows you all of the existing WiFi networks
near you.
The command that you should type is:
airodump-ng wlan0mon.
The terminal will show you a list of available networks. Here’s an example:

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4. Save the data packets as a “cap” file.
You can accomplish this task by issuing the “—write” command to airodump-ng. The
code that you should use is:
airodump-ng wlan0mon —write FileName
Just replace “FileName” with the filename that you want to use. Let’s assume that you
want to use “practice” as the file. The code becomes:
airodump-ng wlan0mon —write sample
The information will be saved in a file named “sample.cap”.
5. Run a password cracker.
Launch another terminal and run “aircrack-ng” to identify the password of the network.
Just type the name of the program and specify the cap file you created earlier. For this
example, the command is:
aircrack-ng sample
It’s possible that your file contains more than one WiFi network. If that is the case,
aircrack-ng will ask you to specify the one you want to attack. Follow the instructions on
the screen and wait for the program to complete the process. The resulting code will have
colons (“:”) in it. You can get the password of the network by removing the colons. For
example, if you got EX:AM:PL:ES, the password of the network is EXAMPLES.

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