Cracking WiFis, the Apple way; part 1: external card, backtrack, aircrack-ng, the VM

OS X natively is no good

First, trying to crack wi-fi APs on OS X natively will not work great. KisMAC is not great, it cannot inject packets with the macbook's default wi-fi card. aircrack-ng does not work.

The usb wi-fi card

So to inject stuff, an external USB wi-fi is required. I have tried ALFA AWUS036NEH (chipset Ralink RT3070) and TP-Link TL-WN722N (chipset Atheros AR9271).

ALFA's are recommended by half the internet, but I think they suck. My Alfa is not stable, it doesn't work with BT5R3, only BT5R2. The Atheros is a lot better, but no 5Ghz. I'm waiting for NETGEAR WNDA3200 which has 5Ghz radio that works simultaneously with the 2.4Ghz radio.

The VM

The best VM to use is BackTrack - all the cracking tools are inside. Latest version is BT5R3. It even comes as a prebuilt VMware virtual machine. I'm using VMware Fusion on OS X.

(user: root, pass: toor; startx to launch gnome):

Adding the card to the USB:

Screen Shot 2013-02-24 at 8.08.52 PM

Then in terminal we check for a wi-fi card. We find one on wlan1 and start a monitoring interface for it.

# airmon-ng
# airmon-ng start wlan1
# airmon-ng

Then, let's check the wi-fis:

# airodump-ng mon0

In later articles we'll see how to hack the wi-fi.

8 thoughts on “Cracking WiFis, the Apple way; part 1: external card, backtrack, aircrack-ng, the VM”

  1. Thanks for your post. I am following your blog now.

    I just bough this TP-Link card to use it with BT, so it's ok for me.
    But do you know if there is any way to install it in Mac OSX? it seams don't have any driver...
    Maybe a Hackintosh kext?

    best

  2. your website is simple and easy to understand .........i found first time as better tutorial......i want to know tp link is good adapter...bcoz i want to purchase only one time...bcoz my laptop internal card not seen any wifi haking tool....its only support commview wifi....plz sir suggest me a best card to buy...bcoz i have not so much money to spend lots of adapter....and update asimple tutorial to installl it....like driver patch bla bla bla.....i woluld be thankfull for u....i m from india so plz dont send me link international shoping website....thank u sir

  3. Is there an update for the 2014 mac book pro and what card we should use? Aircrack does not see the internal wifi card.

  4. Sometimes it is difficult to manage airodump-ng output files. i mean once i generate those csv and xml files then after i start looking into it so for large amount of data i can't figure it out. so is there any tools or services available for analysis and visualization ? i have used this website and it is quite

    good, here i have shared my sample data have a look and also share any other sources if anyone knows. - http://bit.ly/1Nbfgm6

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