These steps apply to both Linksys wireless access points (WAPs) and Linksys DD-WRT wireless routers. Of course, DD-WRT wireless routers have additional security precautions that need to be taken on the router and wireless side.

1-Change the password – With all Linksys routers and access points, it is extremely important to change the device’s default password. Login to your router and enter the default password. The version of the firmware or the router that you are using will determine where the Change Password button is located. Make sure you find it. This is the single most important step. Change the default password and choose a password that contains both numbers and letters. This will reduce the possibility of your password being guessed or hacked.
2-Change your SSID – The SSID is the shared network name that all devices run on a wireless network. The name is case sensitive and should be no longer than 32 characters. You can use any keyboard character you choose when renaming the SSID. The default SSID of the Linksys access point or wireless broadband router is set to Linksys. It is highly recommended that you change the SSID to a unique name other than the default. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been meaning to do a tutorial on cracking WPA wireless for quite a while, but I found this video that explains the methodology really simple. Let me say that cracking WPA is not like cracking WEP, in WEP you’re exploiting a vulnerability in the way the encryption algorithm is implemented, but in WPA the only vulnerability will be in the strength of the user passphrase. Yes you’ve guessed it, when cracking WPA basically what you’re doing is brute-forcing the user password, in other words the success of your attack will depend on your dictionary or password list. If the user’s passphrase is not in your dictionary, you will never crack the WPA key. There are several types of WPA dictionary list out there, but I highly recommend using rainbow-tables which can be several Gigs in size. How to find them?… Google is your friend! Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I decided to do a bit of WarDriving (mapping Access Points) and bought a cheap but very easy to install GPS receiver (GlobalSat BU-353) on Amazon.com, so I put together this quick guide for wardrving. This is only one of the many ways of doing wardriving, for this article I chose Netstumbler for detecting the Access Points, but there are other tools out there, that can do the job more effectively, I personally like wifihopper, who unlike netstumbler identifies the type of encryption been used by the Access Point. Another tool for detecting AP is Kismet, but this one only works in Linux, and all of this tools mentioned have support for a GPS receiver.

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In this article I will go over the steps for building a wireless bridge with two Linksys (WRT54GL) wireless router, for this I assume that dd-wrt has been installed onto the router. Knowledge of ip address configuration is essential, as well as general networking understanding. In Client Bridge mode the two wireless router are part of the same subnet, this configuration is useful if you have a computer or laptop without wireless adapter in a room by itself, connecting it to a second wireless router and configuring this router as a client bridge will solve this problem.

Note: For this article I assume that the Server Router has already been configured, when in client bridge configuration the server router has to be in Access Point mode, and your network address is 192.168.1.0. Read the rest of this entry »