Wi-Fi Password Cracking

Wi-Fi password cracking is the process of discovering the password used to protect a wireless network. These are some techniques used in password cracking:

Social engineering – The attacker manipulates a person who knows the password into providing it.

Brute-force attacks – The attacker tries several possible passwords in an attempt to guess the password. If the password is a 4-digit number, for example, the attacker would have to try every one of the 10000 combinations. Brute-force attacks usually involve a word-list file. This is a text file containing a list of words taken from a dictionary. A program then tries each word and common combinations. Because brute-force attacks take time, complex passwords take much longer to guess. A few password brute-force tools include Ophcrack, L0phtCrack, THC Hydra, RainbowCrack, and Medusa.

Network sniffing – By listening and capturing packets sent on the network, an attacker may be able to discover the password if the password is being sent unencrypted (in plain text). If the password is encrypted, the attacker may still be able to reveal it by using a password cracking tool.