What are the best Wifi pentesting tools in 2023?
The internet has become an integral part of our lives today. Ranging from social media platforms, online shopping, mobile banking, online research among other things… all require an internet connection today.
It is why you see Wi-Fi hotspots wherever you go because people always need to connect to the internet. Most of this Wi-Fi is usually secured with a password, so you need to know this security key in order to gain access.
Wi-Fi security analysis and penetration testing is integral part of creating a secure network. And this is what brings us to the best Wifi penetration testing tools that you can use to ethically test a wireless network and fix it.
By trying to hack into your own wireless network using these wifi hacking tools, you’ll be able to better understand wifi security vulnerabilities and how to protect yourself from them.
In this article, we are going to look at the wifi penetration testing tools used by hackers in 2023. If you are completely new to pentesting or need to upgrade your skills, check out my other article learning pentesting through online tutorials.
Using these wireless pentesting tools, you’ll be able to uncover rogue access points, weak Wifi passwords and spot security holes before a hacker does. You can also use these wifi hacking tools to see who is doing what in your network by analyzing their network packets.
Aircrack is one of the most popular wifi pentesting tools for cracking both WEP and WPA wifi passwords.
It uses one of the smartest algorithms for capturing passwords by first capturing the network packets. Once it has gathered enough packets, it uses them to try and recover the wifi password by implementing an optimized FMS attack.
Apart from supporting most of the available wireless adapters, it has a very high success rate and is almost always guaranteed to work.
In order to effectively be able to use this wifi pentest tool to crack wifi passwords, you’ll need deep knowledge and understanding of Linux as it comes as a Linux distribution.
Reaver is also one of the most popular open-source wireless network pentesting tools, but it has taken a long time without continuous development.
This wifi hacking tool uses brute force attack to crack wifi passwords for WPA/WPA2 wireless networks. Even though the source code for this amazing wireless pentesting tool was hosted on Google, here is a great Reaver usage documentation that shows how to use it.
I still find it a great wifi hacking tool even though it has taken many years without updates. You can use it as a great alternative to other wireless penetration testing tools that use brute force attack to crack wifi security keys.
Airsnort is a free wifi pentesting tool that is used to crack wifi passwords for WEP networks.
It works by gathering network packets, examining them, and then using them to compose the encryption key once enough packets have been gathered. This tool is very easy to use and comes with both the Windows and Linux operating systems.
Even though it’s a great password cracking tool for a WEP network, it has the same problem as the Reaver tool that I mentioned above. The Airsnort source code is still available on Sourceforge.net but it has not been updated in years…
It’s a great wifi security tool to try, though, for hacking wifi passwords.
Cain and Abel is one of the top wireless penetration testing tools for cracking WEP wifi passwords, particularly for the Windows platform.
It’s popular because if its ability to crack wifi passwords using various techniques like network packet sniffing, dictionary attacks, brute force attacks, and cryptanalysis. This tool can also recover network security keys by analyzing network protocols.
Apart from cracking passwords, you can also use these wifi hacking tools to record VoIP conversations, get cache data as well as to get hold of routing protocols for the purpose of ethical hacking. It is an updated tool and is available for all the different versions of the Windows operating system.
Infernal Twin is an automated wireless penetration testing tool created to aid pentesters to assess the security of a wifi network.
Using this tool you can create an Evil Twin attack, by creating a fake wireless access point to sniff network communications. After creating a fake wifi access point you can eavesdrop users using phishing techniques and launch a man-in-the-middle attack targeting a particular user.
Because this tool is written in Python, you can install in various Linux distros and use it for wireless network auditing and pentesting. It enables you to hack wifi passwords for WEP/WPA/WPA2 wireless networks.
Wireshark is a free and open-source wireless penetration testing tool for analyzing network packets.
It enables you to know what is happening in your wireless network by capturing the packets and analyzing them at a micro-level. Because it’s multi-platform it can run on all the popular operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris & FreeBSD.
Even though it might not help you recover plaintext passphrases, you can use it to sniff and capture live data on wifi networks, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB among others.
However, to use this tool adequately, you need a deep understanding of network protocols in order to be able to analyze the data obtained. So you first need to study network protocols and here are the best networking courses online to get you started.
Wifiphisher is another great wifi pentesting tool for cracking the password of a wireless network.
It functions by creating a fake wireless access point which you can use for red team engagements or wifi security testing. Using this tool you can easily achieve a man-in-the-middle position again wifi access clients by launching a targeted wifi association attack.
You can the use it to mount victim customized web phishing attacks against the connected clients in order to capture credentials or infect their stations with malware.
So you can use it to launch fast automated phishing attacks on a wifi network to steal passwords. Even this tool is free and comes pre-installed in the Kali Linux distro, it is also available for Windows and Mac OS’es.
CowPatty is an automated command-line wireless penetration testing tool for launching dictionary attacks on WPA/WPA2 wifi networks using PSK-based authentication.
It can launch an accelerated network attack if a precomputed PMK file is available for the SSID being assessed. Because this wireless hacking tool runs on a word-list containing the passwords to be used in the attack, you are out of luck if the password is not within the passwords’ word list.
Another drawback is the sluggishness of this tool because the hash uses SHA1 with the SSID speed which depends on the password strength. So it uses the password dictionary to generate the hash for each word contained in the dictionary using the SSID. Thus even though this tool is easy to use, it’s really slow.
OmniPeek is a very popular wireless pentesting tool that is used for packet sniffing as well as network packet analyzing.
Even though this is a paid tool and only runs on the Windows OS, it has a 30 day trial to test run the platform before you commit to a paid plan. It works just as great as, and is a similar way, as Wireshark that I already mentioned above.
However, while you can use this tool to capture and analyze wireless network traffic, you’ll need a deep knowledge of network protocols and packets to be able to understand the collected data. One reason it’s very popular as a wireless network hacking tool is that it supports almost all the available network interface cards in the market…
So you are less likely to face network card compatibility issues. Besides, you can also extend the functionality of this wifi pentest tool by using many of the readily available plugins to achieve greater troubleshooting capabilities.
You’ll also get expert GUI-based views for faster diagnostics because it has a built in expert system that suggests root cause analysis for hundreds of common network problems.
Related:
Linux Distros Hacking
Bug Bounty Courses
So there goes the list of the top wireless hacking tools for pentesting your wifi.
While you can use some of these wifi pentesting tools to crack wifi passwords, you can also use some of them to monitor your network traffic. However, these are not the only wifi security tools out there. There are many more wireless hacking tools.
But these are the most common one among ethical hackers, and you can learn how to use them through these online penetration testing courses. Also, note that even though you can use these wifi penetration testing tools to gain unauthorized access to a network, hacking into a network might be a criminal offence in your country.
So tread with caution if you are going to use these wifi security tools on another network.
These wifi pentesting tools are basically used by system admins or programmers working on a wifi based software for monitoring and troubleshooting wifi networks. I hope you found this list of the top wifi security penetration testing tools useful.
Have you used any of the wifi hacking tools in this list before? Are there other great wifi password cracking tools that are great but I didn’t mention in this top 10 list? Please share your experience with wifi penetration testing in the comments below.