BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide
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Time for action – creating a monitor mode interface

Let's now set our Alfa card into monitor mode!

Follow these instructions to get started:

  1. Boot into BackTrack with your Alfa card connected. Once you are within the console, enter iwconfig to confirm that your card has been detected and the driver has been loaded properly:
  2. Use the ifconfig wlan0 up command to bring the card up. Verify the card is up by running ifconfig wlan0. You should see the word UP in the second line of the output as shown:
  3. To put our card into monitor mode, we will use the airmon-ng utility which is available by default on BackTrack. First run airmon-ng to verify it detects the available cards. You should see the wlan0 interface listed in the output:
  4. Now enter airmon-ng start wlan0 to create a monitor mode interface corresponding to the wlan0 device. This new monitor mode interface will be named mon0. You can verify it has been created by running airmon-ng without arguments again:
  5. Also, running ifconfig should now display a new interface called mon0:

What just happened?

We have successfully created a monitor mode interface mon0. This interface will be used to sniff wireless packets off the air. This interface has been created for our wireless Alfa card.

Have a go hero – creating multiple monitor mode interfaces

It is possible to create multiple monitor mode interfaces using the same physical card. Use the airmon-ng utility to see how you can do this.

Awesome! We have a monitor mode interface just waiting to read some packets off the air. So let's get started!

In the next exercise, we will use Wireshark to sniff packets off the air using the mon0 monitor mode interface we just created.