PACKT publishing, September 2011

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide!

I received a copy of this book one month ago. Due to other projects, I couldn't start reading immediately.

Vivek Ramachandran wrote this book.  Vivek is a security researcher originally from India who seems to be good known on all security conferences.

The book is not too big (about 200 pages) and you find many screenshots of terminal outputs. And you will need these screenshots because they explain many things even better than a long description.

Why BackTrack Linux? The author writes his motiviation in the preface. BackTrack is a distribution with lots of security utils already on board. I tried it with Debian stable because this was already installedon my laptop. This works too, but you have to download and build several tools by your own.

I read the book like a thriller! Every chapter has several sections where you get step by step deeper into the wireless analytics. I knew most basics before. But didn't know how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network. And I learned that hidden ESSIDs help absolutely nothing!

It's good to know the handling of wireless on the linux console and to understand basics of the protocoll. But if you don't: you learn it quite fast with the book howto bring up your wireless interface with iwconfig, wpa_supplicant and co.

But It's not only reading. It's practical beginner's guide. It makes fun to follow the steps described. And I was happy to fail to crack my WPA2-protected network with the dictionary attack.

There is a sample chapter online about the advanced WLAN attacks. There you can enjoy the screenshots even in color :-)

In the last chapters you start working on RADIUS networks. This complex topic is made a little easier with BackTrack Linux because there is already a preconfigured freeradios-server installed.