Chapter 9: WLAN Intrusion Process

The scope of this chapter is to understand the technical capabilities and limitations of a potential unauthorized intruder in order to make sure that your own security measures can withstand a hacker's attempt to breach them. It is important to know not only your own tools and techniques, but also those of the potential adversary, in order to better protect against them. This is the first part of an age-old strategy used by the famous Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, who said, " If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles . If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. " [1]

9.1 Profiling to Select a Target or Gather Information

Target profiling is a term that describes the process of choosing a target for hacking and doing subsequent research on that specific target. Because the Internet has made public (and sometimes private) information very easy to access, once a target has been identified, it is usually a trivial matter to search for and uncover great amounts of information related to that target. Professional hackers normally carry out target profiling; it is not something done by the casual browser. These professional hackers usually choose their targets because the target has or is perceived to have some value to the hacker.

Conducting such high-level acts of intrusion generally means the profiler has a unique and specific set of tools, adequate time to carry out the task, and a strong desire to acquire whatever the target possesses. Hackers use many types of networking tools to gather sensitive information from unsecured wireless networks. These specialized tools include discovery tools, packet analyzers, application layer analyzers, network utility applications, and share enumerators. As IT security professionals become more attuned to these types of attacks and deploy better security architectures for their networks, many of these tools will become obsolete. Social engineering is typically the hacker's next -best approach.