Chapter 3. WLAN Reconnaissance

In this chapter, we are going to introduce the basic concepts behind wireless LANs (Local Area Networks) and see how to carry out the reconnaissance and information gathering phase of our penetration test.

This chapter deals with wireless networks scanning and information gathering, enumerating visible and hidden networks, identifying the security protocols used, their possible vulnerabilities and the connected clients. The topics covered are as follows:

• Introduction to 802.11 standard and wireless LAN
• Introduction to wireless scanning
• Wireless scanning with airodump-ng
• Wireless scanning with Kismet