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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

I attempted to do this once and it turned out to be monumentally difficult. I got as far as setting up a bootable kali thumb drive before getting stopped in my tracks by hardware incompatibilities and unexpected behaviors and errors. These articles make it sounds a LOT easier than it is. I was very disappointed because I was really excited about it.

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It's not for the faint of heart or faint of technical skill - different drivers have different behaviors and ways to enter the various capture and raw packet modes needed to do this.

Personally, as long as I stick to supported chipsets, I've almost never had an issue.

Have you found a wifi card that will work on any laptop or desktop?

I've had great luck with this wireless card. Works out of the box on any linux distro I've used it with. I bought it specifically for its aircrack compatibility (packet injection and monitor mode).

https://www.amazon.com/Alfa-AWUSO36NH-Wireless-Long-Rang-Net...

although some of the reviews seem to indicate there may have been a change in chipset/drivers. I wish you luck!

Not all Alfa products are OOB compatible, you definitely need to be careful. I have the AWUS036AC which requires compiling a DKMS module.

It was a pain the get working on my Raspberry Pi, I had to try several different drivers and edit a Makefile to get it to compile. But I did eventually get it working as an AP, there's a script called create_ap which is very nice to painlessly run an AP on Linux.

Thanks I was looking for something that could work on Mac, Linux, Pi and Windows.

The stuff from

https://tehnoetic.com (EU)

https://www.thinkpenguin.com (USA)

just works.

I tested some of the most popular Kali Linux compatible cards against each other here[0]. Note that there is a version 2 of the popular and cheap TP-Link TL-WN722N which DOES NOT work like the version 1 and should be avoided.

All of these cards are "known to just work" on linux at least.

[0] http://rooftopbazaar.com/wirelesscards/

I beg to differ. I was doing this at 15 or 16 years old in 2006 when it was still called backtrack. So long as you had a mainstream laptop, the most difficult part was buying a compatible wireless card.

To note, the extent of my technical abilities at that time wasn't much beyond being able to install a mainstream linux distribution or write a simple program in C.

Yeah, I used Backtrack to show my brother that his big complex password didn't mean anything if he was using WEP (this was quite a while ago).

On a pretty standard laptop (intel chipset/CPU/GPU/Wireless) it booted right up with no effort.

Regrettably it didn't work out that way for me. I had a brand new macbook air at the time I tried this. When I booted into Kali, I was unable to access the network settings at all[1], period, let alone get any packet sniffing going. I couldn't even connect to the internet.

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/273941/missing-netw...

Thanks for the nostalgia trip. We must be about the same age and I remember hitting up local corporations that had WEP encrypted networks and offering them my help in improving their security.

Felt like a real security expert then ;) I'm out of that loop now but security sure did seem a lot easier to get a grip on at that time.

When I was in school and taking some network security classes I attempted to crack my own wifi. Even after buying a wifi card that could do what I need I faced hardware isssues. It was a major PIA.

It was almost easier to automate a brute force, sit back and wait.

And to make matters worse the compatible hardware has been counterfeited a thousand times over and you never know which one you're going to get purchasing online.

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