aircrack-ng: Opening networks, opening minds

I don’t have a screenshot today, and I don’t have much to tell you about aircrack-ng.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have much experience with it. Quite to the contrary, it has been very useful to me in the past.

What I will tell you about it is, it convinced me to run my own home wireless network without any encryption at all.

Mostly because the few times I tried to lock down my wireless router, I discovered that I could break into it, in most scenarios, in a frighteningly short amount of time.

And I will confess one time I tinkered with an encrypted office network that was in range, and had no trouble entering that either.

Which means two things to me, in the grand scheme of things.

First, that anyone who can handle aircrack-ng (or other tools like it) will probably get into my network, given enough time and determination.

That, to me, means wireless network security is really only a precaution against random people borrowing time on my network.

And since I have been a freeloader in the past (this is the second thing, by the way), and I have been ridiculously thankful for an unsecured public access spot, I leave it open as a courtesy to that one random person who really needs it, to download a driver or send an e-mail.

True, there are bad people in the world who will take advantage of it, but what’s to be done about that? There are bad people everywhere.

aircrack-ng only convinced me to give freely with license, rather than wait to have something taken without permission. 😐

P.S.: I’ll tack on a link to airsnort, without judgment. Similar, but very out of date and probably not useful except in rare situations.