Author : Roopashree S

About : Roopashree has recently started attending null Chapter meets and Humla sessions. She is associated with one of the largest security providers and current area of interest is Web Security Testing.

I had a fabulous experience at “Wireless Hacking with Kali” Null Humla session. When the humla session was announced, the subject sounded very interesting.

Having attended the first humla session on SQL Injection by Riyaz, I was aware that topics are covered in detail and we need to be prepared with all pre-requisites installed considering it is a complete hands-on session.

This session had hardware level pre-requisites which was kind of alien to me, “Laptop should be able to live boot into Kali”. I assumed it to be having the OS installed, and check Wifi connectivity so I went ahead looking for a spare laptop for 2-3 days which I was lucky to get finally and installed it on the physical disk.

I walked into the session with curiosity to check how the other folks who have registered would have managed to get spare laptops. The room was packed with around 40 participants eager to learn Wifi hacking including some folks who had come all the way from Kerala, AP To my surprise I found most of them using their regular laptop with USB sticks live booted into Kali :) So this is what it means by Live boot, gotcha!!!

Ashish started with the basics of creating a monitor mode and WEP. Though I was aware that WEP is kind of a legacy/obsolete setting, I always thought that more human intelligence is required along with tools to break a password. We captured some packets and all it took was to use a tool to get the correct password which was quite a strong password in few minutes.

With advanced tools available, we were able to get WPA2 passwords as well with some brute forcing. As usual, made me realize that inspite of any security provided, it can always be overridden if users don’t have a strong password.

Appreciate Ashish and the null chapter leads who ensured all participants were on the same page throughout the session. The final challenge at the session end was helpful to quickly go over what we had learnt throughout the day and yes, I was able to clear it!!!

I walked out of the session admiring the knowledge of null chapter leads which made me realize that I should prepare to be a humla champion for one of the upcoming sessions. What better and the way to give back to such an active null community? If you have attended a humla session, think about it.