Cybersecurity:Attack and Defense Strategies
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Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a dangerous suite of tools that is used for wireless hacking, and has become legendary in today's cyberspace. The tools are available for both Linux and Windows operating systems. It is important to note that Aircrack-ng relies on other tools to first get some information about its targets. Mostly, these programs discover the potential targets that can be hacked. Airodump-ng is the commonly used tool to do this, but other tools, such as Kismet, are reliable alternatives. Airodump-ng detects wireless access points and the clients connected to them. This information is used by Aircrack-ng to hack the access points.

Today, most organizations and public places have Wi-Fi, and this makes them ideal hunting grounds for hackers in possession of this suite of tools. Aircrack-ng can be used to recover the keys of secured Wi-Fi networks, provided that it captures a certain threshold of data packets in its monitoring mode. The tool is being adopted by white hats that are focused on wireless networks. The suite includes attacks such as FMS, KoreK, and PTW, which makes its capabilities incredible.

The FMS attack is used to attack keys that have been encrypted using RC4. KoreK is used to attack Wi-Fi networks that are secured with WEP-encrypted passwords. Lastly, PTW is used to hack through WEP- and WPA-secured Wi-Fi networks.

Aircrack-ng works in a number of ways. It could be used to monitor the traffic in a Wi-Fi network by capturing packets to be exported in formats that can be read by other scanning tools. It can also attack a network by creating fake access points or injecting its own packets into a network to get more information about the users and devices in a network.

Finally, it can recover passwords for Wi-Fi networks using the aforementioned attacks to try different combinations.

Figure 7: Aircrack-ng interface