Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide

Turning on the Monitor Mode
The next thing we want to do is switch our network card into monitor mode. As mentioned in 
the “Network Sniffing” chapter (Chapter 6), to sniff on wired networks, we need to switch our 
network card into promiscous mode. However, to sniff on wireless networks, we need to make sure 
that our network card is in the monitor mode. One of the advantages of the Alpha card is that it 
allows us to sniff in the monitor mode, so you need to make sure that your network card is allowed 
to sniff in the montior mode for this work.
We can use the following command to change the network card to the monitor mode:
airmon-ng start wlan0
So now we can see that we have succesfully enabled monitor mode on the mon0 interface. 
We can use the 
iwconfig
command to confirm all the interfaces that have monitor mode 
enabled.
Monitoring Beacon Frames on Wireshark
Now that we have the monitor mode enabled, we will sniff on the mon0 network interfaces, which 
will bring us beacon frames containing the SSID that is being broadcasted. If the SSID is not 
broadcasted, it won’t show up.

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Wireless Hacking
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We selected the appropriate interface to sniff on, and we are now able to see beacon frames 
from other access points, which we are not associated with. Whenever the client authenticates 
against the access point with the hidden SSID, it will send an SSID parameter; therefore, we can 
easily figure out what the real SSID is.
Monitoring with Airodump-ng
The easy way around is to use airodump-ng to start monitoring the traffic; as soon as the client 
authenticates, the SSID will be revealed.
Command
:
airodump-ng mon0
The access point that is not broadcasting it’s ESSID would appear with the names such as 
“”, as soon as the client would re-authenticate the hidden SSID would appear.

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