Wi-Fi technology has ushered in a new era of network communication. Wireless networks have made communication more convenient and flexible, but they have also put more people at risk of being hacked. As we saw with the aircrack-ng lab, wireless passwords (even using WPA2 encryption) can be broken rather easily. Besides the aircrack-ng suite, all you need is a large password list and time. This chapter cleared up a common misconception about Wi-Fi hacking or any kind of hacking. The common misconception many people (with no ethical hacking experience) have is that hacking only takes a matter of minutes to gain illegal access to a network. After reading this chapter you should now realize the time it requires to hack a Wi-Fi password. It could take an hour or sometimes weeks depending on the level of network resources and quality of wordlists. By reading this chapter you will now be able to perform dictionary and brute-force attacks. Remember that the main difference between a dictionary attack and a brute-force attack is that the dictionary attack will try and match the most likely passwords from a pre-made list (aka dictionary). The brute-force attack will attempt every possible password combination until a match is found. Reading this chapter has also provided you with defense tips to protect against Wi-Fi password attacks. The two most effective defense tips are having a strong password policy (such as limiting the number of password entries a user can make within a certain time) and choosing a strong password. It is better to have a longer password rather than having one that has more complexity. Most complex passwords are not over 15 characters in length. It is easier to crack a password that uses special characters and uppercase letters than it is to crack a password over 15 characters using no special symbols or capital letters. Later in this book, we will explore more advanced methods of hacking that will build off what you have learned in this chapter.