Wireless Hacking tools of 2016

Our viewers requested for the list of wireless hacking tools. So, I researched and got you the list of most popularly used hacking tools. These tools are used for penetration testing and used widely by hackers.

Note : These are for educational purpose only.

Hacking is illegal

1. Aircrack

Aircrack is the most popular and widely-known wireless password cracking tool. It is used as 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking tool around the globe. It first captures packets of the network and then try to recover password of the network by analyzing packets. It also implements standard attacks with some methods to recover or crack password of the network. methods include KoreK attacks and PTW attack to make the attack much faster than other WEP password cracking tools.

This tool is powerful and used most widely across the world. This is the reason I am adding it at the top of the list. If you find this tool hard to use, you can try the available online tutorials. Company behind this tool also offers online tutorial to let you learn by yourself.

Download: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/

2. AirSnort

AirSnort is another popular wireless LAN password cracking tool. It can crack WEP keys of Wi-Fi802.11b network. This tool basically operates by passively monitoring transmissions and then computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. This tool is freely available for Linux and Windows platform.

It is also simple to use. Company behind this tool is now interested in further development. This tool is also directly involved in WEP cracking and hence used widely.

Download AirSnort: http://sourceforge.net/projects/airsnort/

3. Kismet

Kismet is another Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n layer 2 wireless network sniffer and intrusion detection system. This tool is basically used in Wi-Fi troubleshooting. It works fine with any Wi-Fi card supporting rfmon mode. It is available for Windows, Linux, OS X and BSD platforms. This tool passively collects packets to identify standard network and also detects the hidden networks.

It is an easy to use open source tool and supports recent faster wireless standards.

Download Kismet: http://www.kismetwireless.net/download.shtml

4. Cain & Able

Cain & Able is another popular tool used for cracking wireless network passwords. This tool was developed to intercept the network traffic and then use the brute forcing to discover the passwords. This is why this tool helps a lot while finding the password of wireless network by analyzing the routing protocols. This tool can also be used to crack other kind of passwords. It is one of the most popular password cracking tools.

This tool is not just for WEP cracking but various other features are also there. It is basically used for Windows password cracking. This is the reason this tool is so popular among users.

Download Cain & Able: http://www.oxid.it/cain.html

5. WireShark

WireShark is a very popular tool in networking. This tool is available for Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and other platforms.

If you are thinking to try this tool, I recommend you to first read about networking and protocols. WireShark requires good knowledge of network protocols to analyze the data obtained with the tool. If you do not have good knowledge of that, you may not find this tool interesting.

Wireshark does is one of the most popular tool in networking and this is why it was included in this list in higher position.

Download Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/

6. Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker

Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker is another nice tool which helps with network security. It lets you see real-time network traffic and identify hosts. Basically this tool was developed to find flaws in computer networks and fixes the detected flaws. It is available for Apple, Windows and Linux platforms.

it is able to crack and recover WEP/WPA/WPS keys easily. It can also run other network based attacks on wireless or Ethernet based networks. For cracking WPA/WPA2, it uses WPS based on dictionary based attacks.

Download Fern WiFi Wireless cracker: http://www.fern-pro.com/downloads.php

7. CoWPAtty

CoWPAtty is another nice wireless password cracking tool. It is an automated dictionary attack tool for WPA-PSK to crack the passwords. It runs on Linux OS and offers a less interesting command line interface to work with. It runs on a word-list containing thousands of password to use in the attack. If the password is in the password’s word-list, this tool will surely crack the password.

So, the tool uses the password dictionary and generates the hash for each word contained in the dictionary by using the SSID. This tool is simple to use with available commands.

If your SSID is not in those 1000, you are unlucky. Still, you can try this tool to see how it works.

Download CoWPAtty: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cowpatty/

8. Reaver

Reaver is an open-source tool for performing brute force attack against WPS to recover WPA/WPA2 pass keys. This tool is hosted on Google Code and may disappear soon if developer has not migrated it to another platform.

Similar to other tools, this tool can be a good alternate to other tools in the list which use same attack method.

Download Reaver: https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/downloads/list

9. WepAttack

WepAttack is another working open source Linux tool for breaking 802.11 WEP keys. Like few other tools in the list, this tool also performs an active dictionary attack. It tests millions of words from its dictionary to find the working key for the network. Only a working WLAN card is required to work with WepAttack to perform the attack. Limited usability but works awesome on supported WLAN cards.

Download WepAttack: http://wepattack.sourceforge.net/

10. NetStumbler

NetStumbler is another wireless password cracking tool available only for Windows platform. It helps in finding open wireless access points. This tool is freely available.

This tool is not very effective now. Main reason is that last stable release of the tool was back in April 2004 around 11 years ago. So, it does not work with 64-bit Windows OS. So, you can use this tool for learning purpose on home network to see how it works.

A trimmed down version dubbed as ‘MiniStumbler’ of the tool is also available. This tool is too old but it still works fine on supported systems. So, I included it in this list.

Download NetStumbler: http://www.stumbler.net/