AliExpress is a store that not only sells gadgets and accessories, but also products of dubious legality. In addition to selling things like pirted IPTV, or having sold parts that allowed robberies at ATMs, now antennas are also sold to ha-ck WiFi . Do they work or are they a scam?
WEP was the first encryption to be used on WiFi networks . However, its cracking allowed to recover passwords in just minutes, which led to the arrival of WPA. This encryption has already taken several iterations, with WPA2 as the most widespread, and WPA3 as the most recent and improving some small cracks in WPA2.
Cracking WPA2 and WPA3 is very difficult, and almost impossible
To ha-ck WPA , it is necessary to use dictionaries , as brute force attacks cannot be carried out. There are tools such as Fluxion or Linset that are used to obtain these keys through a social engineering technique. To do this, the fastest way is to use deauthentication attacks, which disconnect all clients from the network and create a rogue access point with the same characteristics of the real access point. There, the user has to enter the password manually for the attack to work. After that, the entered password is compared with the handshake (easier to obtain), while the user is redirected to the real network.
Thus, it is necessary for the user to enter the password manually. If not, the password hash needs to be cracked, which can take years, and even decades for a long and complex password that doesn’t appear in any dictionary. This is why it is important that, if you suffer a disconnection in your network, you do not re-enter the password on the affected device. In addition, it is important to use long passwords filled with special characters .
To carry out all this process, the most common is usually to use computers. The WiFi cards that equip desktop computers and laptops are quite powerful. At the software level, many distros are used to check security on these WiFi networks, such as Wifislax .
High Power Antenna Kits – Useless
However, in stores like AliExpress, kits with antennas are sold with names like ” high power USB WiFi decoder “. This type of repeater is designed to increase the distance at which packets can be captured from a WiFi network, and can even replace the antenna to increase the capture distance.
In the description, however, we started to see gaps in these kits. For starters, they claim that it is only possible to crack WEP-protected WiFi networks . This standard has not been used by default in newer routers for more than a decade, and even current routers cannot use this encryption.
So even though the antenna is more powerful, the software these companies use is hilarious, and dangerously out of date. Not only do we see that the descriptions only detail compatibility with Windows 7, but also the software on which the tools offered by this 2010 are based. We can even see that the captures are made with Windows XP using a virtual machine.
Therefore, these antenna kits can be useful to capture packets in remote networks, but the cracking process remains the same, which is really complex with current WiFi networks thanks to the excellent protection they enjoy. In short, it is important that you do not fall into the trap of this type of device, since you will not be able to crack a WiFi network, and in the case of wanting to test the security of your home, you can do it with any computer without have to increase the range.
