Wireless sniffer

Good afternoon,

Can somebody recommend a good "wireless sniffer" to see what's running in my neighborhood? I'm running XP SP2. I'm currently using "Netstumbler" as it shows my wi-fi S/N ratio. Is NetStumbler good enough?

TIA for your time,

Reply to
Curt Christianson
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I normally use but you might want to check to see how well you wireless card is supported under Linux & Backtrack first.

Also you might look at &

Or even

John

Reply to
John Mason Jr

Thank you John. I appreciate your input, as this is *not* my area of expertise.

Reply to
Curt Christianson

Just as a by-the-by, here is a usb adapter that doubles as a standalone wifi sniffer:

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have one of these, and it's fun to ride around on a bicycle with it in my pocket and take it out every so often and see what networks are available.

rms

Reply to
rms

"Curt Christianson" hath wroth:

Netstumber will display access points and ad-hoc networks. It will NOT display access points that have SSID broadcast turned off, infrastructure clients, or non-802.11 radios. Netstumbler is an "active scanner" that works by transmitting a probe request packet, and listening for the response. If the 802.11 device doesn't feel like responding, Netstumbler does not show anything.

Somewhat better is Kismet running on Linux. There are various Linux LiveCD's that include Kismet, such as Backtrack:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I found the biggest difficulty with kismet is the conf file. While I have it running, I have to admit how I got it running would not be easy to explain. For one thing, you don't run it as root, but you sort of need to be root to start kismet. [Of course it is very likely to be pilot error. ] I find that I need to log in as the user (i.e. not root), but then I need to start kismet in a terminal window that was superusered over to root.

Kismet is an order of magnitude more informative than netstumbler, but you have to earn your stripes.

Now that wifi equipped phones are coming on the market, you can hope some hackers adapt them to sniffers.

Reply to
miso

Wow! A very big thanks to all who responded. Very comprehensive and informative.

Reply to
Curt Christianson

snipped-for-privacy@sushi.com hath wroth:

Agreed. I thought it was just type "kismet" and it would just work. Not so. I had to setup a user id, point to the wireless driver, and then run it as root with: sudo kismet General instructions at:

Sorta. It needs to run as root to directly access the wireless device. Use "sudo kismet" and it will work.

Try sudo.

Not really. The various LiveCD's usually have everything setup in advance on the desktop.

If you're addicted to graphics, there's gKismet:

I've never tried it. Looks nice.

Speaking of config problems, I had considerable difficulties getting kismet_drone running on a WRT54GS.

It was ugly and does not run reliably. However, it does allow me to run the kismet client part on a Windoze PC under Cygwin. I have kismet_drone running on several remote DD-WRT based routers as sniffers. However, that was DD-WRT v23 SP2. I've had no luck with v23 SP3 or various v24 releases.

Without a real browser on the handset, methinks it's improbable. For example, how does one login to a T-mobile hotspot without a browser in the window?

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

iPhone has a browser, no?

Reply to
Warren Oates

Warren Oates hath wroth:

Si. Due to lack of specifics, I assumed he was referring to one of VoIP wi-fi phones or possibly one of the Skype versions:

Few of these have browsers or are able to deal with a login request.

Incidentally, I use my Verizon XV6700 with Skype all the time.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I mentioned iPhone because it's gone down in price (not enough) and been hacked (ditto) to work with any service. And it's kinda cool.

Reply to
Warren Oates

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