AA1 WiFi Cracking Quick Instructions

You need:

• Acer Aspire One (AA1)
• 1GB or larger USB thumb drive
• A target

Setup:

1. Download BackTrack 3 (torrent here)
2. Uncompress ISO with favorite application (I prefer IZArc)
3. Copy BT3 and BOOT folders to the thumb drive
4. Start a command prompt and enter the following, with X being the letter of your thumb drive (NOTE: make sure when you run bootinst that it specifies the correct drive letter)
   1. X:
   2. cd boot
   3. bootinst

The Assault:

1. Restart the AA1
2. When the initial BIOS screen starts, press F12 a couple of times
3. Select your thumb drive from the list
4. On the first menu, choose the fourth option
5. Press the space bar when it gripes about not having the right video settings
6. Wait for the login prompt.
7. Log in with the username root and a password of toor
8. Type the following commands to break the first encrypted connection it comes across:
   1. airmon-ng stop ath0
   2. airmon-ng start wifi0
   3. wesside-ng -i ath0

That’s pretty much it.  You sit and wait for it to find a connection, sniff the data and bust it wide open.  I’ve seen this take as little as 1.5 minutes all the way up to 4-5 hours, it all depends on the traffic on the network.

For a more precise attack you can specify an access point by its MAC address by adding -v 00:00:00:00:00:00 to the last command, replacing the 00:00:00 etc with the actual MAC address so it looks something like this:

wesside-ng -v 12:34:56:78:90:ab -i ath0

To find the MAC address of an access point, use something like netstumbler for Windows XP or inSSIDer for Vista/Windows 7.