Building a Pentesting Lab for Wireless Networks is a practical guide to building a penetration testing lab, accessible via Wi-Fi, which contains vulnerable components and at the same time secured from unauthorized external access. This book is intended for people learning ethical hacking and for security professionals who are responsible for penetration testing and maintaining security in their organization who wish to learn how to build a penetration testing lab for wireless networks.
The fact that the lab is secured from external access allows readers to use it both in corporate and home networks without putting themselves at risk. Thus, the book will be useful not only for people new to information security but also for security professionals who want to shift their expertise to the ethical hacking field. You will learn how to plan your lab, fill it with components, configure them, and secure the environment. Additionally, you will get an overview of the most popular hacking frameworks and toolsets and will be able to prepare your own wireless hacking platform on a Linux laptop or a virtual machine.
Chapter 1, Understanding Wireless Network Security and Risks, reviews which wireless technologies are used to transfer data, describes the associated risks and concludes which Wi-Fi protection mechanism is the most secure.
Chapter 2, Planning Your Lab Environment, designs the lab topology, plans its components to imitate a real corporate network and allow you to practice most of the possible lab tasks.
Chapter 3, Configuring Networking Lab Components, helps you understand the network communication and access rules in our lab environment, and you see two options on how to build your lab network, based on hardware Cisco devices and virtual ones.
Chapter 4, Designing Application Lab Components, shows you how to fill your lab with useful components, which actually bring sense to the whole story of building a lab network. We install the most common services that you are most likely to meet in the scope of a commercial penetration testing project and which you most probably would like to be able to hack.
Chapter 5, Implementing Security, shows our readers how to protect the lab network from unauthorized access and external attacks by installing and configuring network- and host-based security solutions. Additionally to securing the lab network, we prepare it for practicing important penetration testing topics, such as bypassing and evading security mechanisms and assessing their effectiveness.
Chapter 6, Exploring Hacking Toolkits, gives you an overview of several popular toolkits used in numerous hacking tasks and projects, along with examples of their utilization in the lab environment. It helps you get a brief understanding of their capabilities and a foundation for further learning.
Chapter 7, Preparing a Wireless Penetration Testing Platform, shows you how to prepare a penetration testing platform for wireless hacking, including the basic necessary tools. Additionally, the chapter explains how to choose a Wi-Fi interface suitable for penetration testing.
Chapter 8, What's Next?, gives you some hints regarding what to start with and in which direction to dig if you want to develop ethical hacking skills and become a professional penetration tester.