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Part III: Hacking Network Hosts
✓ Loss of network access, including e-mail, web, and other services that
can cause business downtime
✓ Loss of sensitive information, including passwords, customer data,
intellectual property, and more
✓ Regulatory consequences and legal liabilities associated with unauthorized
users gaining access to your business systems
Most of the wireless vulnerabilities are in the 802.11 standard and how it works.
Wireless access points (APs) and client systems have some vulnerabilities
as well.
Various fixes have come along in recent years to address these vulnerabilities,
yet still many of these fixes haven’t been properly applied or aren’t
enabled by default. Your employees might also install rogue WLAN equipment
on your network without your knowledge. Then there’s “free” Wi-Fi
practically everywhere your mobile workforce goes. These free Internet connections
are one of the most serious threats to your overall information security
and a pretty difficult one to fight. Even when WLANs are hardened and all
the latest patches have been applied, you still might have security problems,
such as DoS, man-in-the-middle attacks, and encryption key weaknesses (like
you have on wired networks — see Chapter 8), that will likely be around for a
while.
Choosing Your Tools
Several great WLAN security tools are available for both the Windows and
UNIX platforms. The UNIX tools — which run mostly on Linux and BSD —
were notoriously a bear to configure and run properly, but that problem
has changed in recent years in programs such as Kismet (www.kismet
wireless.net) and Wellenreiter (http://sourceforge.net/projects/
wellenreiter).
If you want the power of the security tools that run on Linux, but you’re
not interested in installing and learning much about Linux or don’t have
the time to download and set up many of its popular security tools, I highly
recommend you check out BackTrack (www.backtrack-linux.org). The
bootable Debian-based Linux CD “automagically” detects your hardware settings
and comes with a slew of security tools that are relatively easy to use.
Alternative bootable (or live) CDs include the Fedora Linux-based Network
Security Toolkit (www.networksecuritytoolkit.org). A complete listing
of live bootable Linux toolkits is available at www.livecdlist.com.