For some reason I’ve never posted about Kismet, and I don’t like to assume everyone knows everything. So for those who may not have heard of it, here’s Kismet.

Kismet is one of foundation tools Wireless Hacking, it’s very mature and does what it’s supposed to do.

Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.

Kismet identifies networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting (and given time, decloaking) hidden networks, and infering the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic.

Features

• Ethereal/Tcpdump compatible data logging
• Airsnort compatible weak-iv packet logging
• Network IP range detection
• Built-in channel hopping and multicard split channel hopping
• Hidden network SSID decloaking
• Graphical mapping of networks
• Client/Server architecture allows multiple clients to view a single
• Kismet server simultaneously
• Manufacturer and model identification of access points and clients
• Detection of known default access point configurations
• Runtime decoding of WEP packets for known networks
• Named pipe output for integration with other tools, such as a layer3 IDS like Snort
• Multiplexing of multiple simultaneous capture sources on a single Kismet instance
• Distributed remote drone sniffing
• XML output
• Over 20 supported card types

If you need to get funky with a wireless network, grab Kismet for a start.

You can download the latest stable source here:

kismet-2007-10-R1.tar.gz (sig)

Or read more here.