L in u X ba sics for h acke rs g e t t I n g s t a r t e d w I t h

Checking Wireless Network Devices with iwconfig
If you have an external USB, you can use the 
iwconfig
command to gather 
crucial information for wireless hacking such as the adapter’s IP address, its 
MAC address, what mode it’s in, and more. The information you can glean 
from this command is particularly important when you’re using wireless 
hacking tools like aircrack-ng.

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Analyzing and Managing Networks
31
Using the terminal, let’s take a look at some wireless devices with 
iwconfig
(see Listing 3-2).
kali >iwconfig
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
--snip--
lo no wireless extensions
eth0 no wireless extensions
Listing 3-2: Using iwconfig to get information on wireless adapters
The output here tells us that the only network interface with wireless 
extensions is 
wlan0
, which is what we would expect. Neither 
lo
nor 
eth0
has 
any wireless extensions.
For 
wlan0
, we learn what 802.11 IEEE wireless standards our device is 
capable of: 
b
and 
g
, two early wireless communication standards. Most wire-
less devices now include 
n
as well (
n
is the latest standard).
We also learn from 
iwconfig
the mode of the wireless extension (in this 
case, 
Mode:Managed
, in contrast to monitor or promiscuous mode). We’ll need 
promiscuous mode for cracking wireless passwords.
Next, we can see that the wireless adapter is not connected (
Not Associated
) 
to an access point (AP) and that its power is 20 dBm, which represents the 
strength of signal. We’ll spend more time with this information in Chapter 14.