WI-FI Hacks

Before knowing about hacking please keep in mind it’s illegal/offensive to enter to any ones private network. The knowledge what you are gaining try to use it for educating the people who are using the vulnerable networks by knowing/unknowingly.
It’s always compulsory to be an ethical & trustworthy in pursuing once career in IT securities.

WI-FI networks offers lot of possibilities to hack when it is not designed properly, let’s start from the basic level and move ahead.

Before hacking a WI-FI network you must know how to find the wireless networks with in the reach and surroundings, if you are using windows then you might be seeing a wireless LAN icon on your taskbar if wifi LAN card is enabled and wireless button on your laptop is ON, if not then open my network places on your desktop and enable a wifi LAN.
For finding a wireless networks you can use netstumbler. For more details on this please click on following link to know about wardriving http://wi-fiwardriving.blogspot.com/

Once you found the wireless networks check for unsecured network presence these can be noticed by verifying encryption column on netstumbler or on windows view wireless networks option by right clicking a wifi LAN icon on taskbar. Just try to connect them either by double clicking or by clicking on connect option on your view wireless network option.
It will try to connect the network and tries to acquire IP Address from the WI-FI router or Access Point with DHCP enabled and Encryption, Mac filtering is disabled then you could connect to the wireless network,
Now check the ipsettings these can be done by going to command prompt and type ipconfig/all if you found ip on wireless adapter then try to ping the gateway ip address by typing ping default gateway ex: ping 172.16.1.1 if you are getting reply then you connected to the wireless network, now try to ping Google e: ping www.google.com if you are getting reply then you can enjoy a free wireless internet.

If you get message saying that limited/no connectivity, this might be due to un availability of IP address, then you go to the My network places on your desktop right click and click on properties you will see a wireless local area network. Right-click on it and go to properties and double-click on internet protocol TCP/IP now check on obtain IP address automatically and try to connect the wireless network.

Still getting the same error then now try to play with the ip settings normally all office/home networks will be using private ip address for sharing internet/LAN, the private IP address come in the range shown below

10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0-172.16.255.255
192.168.0.0-192.168.255.255

Don’t required to know much about these ip addressing system, normally more over networks use either 172.16.1.0 or 192.168.1.0 hence try by configuring the following IP settings like 172.16.1.9 and try changing the lost digit and subnet mask must be 255.255.0.0 or even 255.255.255.0 and remember default gateway must always be 172.16.1.1 when you are using 172.16.1.255 stack for 192.168.1.255 stack it should be 192.168.1.1.
If you want to know more about IP Addressing system try to Google.

We have done a lot of surveys in and around Mumbai and found almost more then 30% of networks which are open for intruders with DHCP enabled just click connect and you are in...

These types of office networks are more vulnerable for attacks not only for the free internet usage but attacker can get into your systems as simple as he directly connected to your network
Attackers can take full control of the whole network, view and edit files, copy the data. For network exploits check the new series publishing shortly

The method what we discussed above doesn’t require any hacking skills; a normal computer user can easily do all these things.

Check for next blog/article on how to crack a secured wifi network