Crack WEP using BackTrack
posted Jul 2nd 2009 1:30pm by Zach Banksfiled under: downloads hacks, security hacks, wireless hacks
Lifehacker wrote a guide for cracking a WiFi network’s WEP password using BackTrack. BackTrack is a Linux live CD used for security testing and comes with the tools needed to break WEP. Not just any wireless card will work for this; you need one that supports packet injection. The crack works by collecting legitimate packets then replaying them several times in order to generate data. They point out that this method can be hit-or-miss, especially if there are few other users on the network, as the crack requires authenticated packets. We covered cracking WEP before, but using BackTrack should smooth out compatibility issues.
If there are few users on the network and not many IVs are being captured, you can use an injecting attack to generate more. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed it, but it really beats sitting around for an hour.