Cracking WPA/WPA2 – PSK Encryption

About a month ago, to my embarrassment, I learned that my Wi-Fi password was so weak that even my 10 year old neighbour could crack it…
No, not really.

• A little Disclaimer – The contents of this post are solely for ethical and educational purposes. You may not use it for unethical purposes. The Author or the Website is not responsible for any damage to yourself, your network, or the computers in you network, should something go wrong. (Basically guys, be careful where you use this and please don’t do anything stupid.)

We’re going to start with a little introduction to Kali Linux, because that is the OS I prefer, is the easiest for this task and comes with all the tools we need. “Kali” is a Linux distribution and is the successor to the much acclaimed Backtrack, which many of you reading this article will probably know of. Now, there are many ways of installing and using Kali, if anyone needs any help, leave in the comments, and I will probably write another post about installing and its basics in the future.

In this tutorial, I’m going to hack into a Wi-Fi hotspot that I just set up, named – Anonymus.
Now, given that we have Kail Linux, open up a terminal window, type in “ifconfig “. This is going to list all the networking interfaces connected to your device.

Here, we only need (wlan0) which is our Wi-Fi card, so we can disable the others by doing “ifconfig <name of the interface> down”.
(“lo” does no matter)…

Now, we type “airmon-ng start wlan0”

(airmon-ng is just a tool for monitoring air traffic, “start” basically starts the tool, and “wlan0” specifies the interface we are using for monitoring)
It’ll probably show “some processes that could cause trouble”, we’ll simply kill those processes by entering “kill <process ID>”.