We started this chapter by focusing on the general airspace surrounding the Wi-Fi network in our home. Using the Kismet application, we learned how to obtain information about the access point itself and any associated Wi-Fi adapters, as well as how to protect our network from sneaky rouge access points.

Shifting the focus to the insides of our network, we used the Nmap software to quickly map out all the running computers on our network and we also looked at the more advanced features of Nmap that can be used to produce a detailed HTML report about each connected machine.

We then moved on to the fascinating topics of network sniffing, ARP poisoning, and man-in-the-middle attacks with the frightfully effective Ettercap application. We saw how to use Ettercap to spy on network traffic and web browsers, how to manipulate HTML code in transit to display unexpected images, and how to drop packets to keep your network guests from hogging up all the juicy bandwidth.

Thankfully, there are ways to protect oneself from Ettercap's mischief and we discussed how encryption completely changes the game when it comes to network sniffing. We also looked at static ARP entries as a viable protection against ARP poisoning attacks.

We concluded the chapter with an introduction to network traffic analysis using Wireshark, where we learned about the standard pcap log format and how to open up packet dumps from Ettercap and Kismet over the network through SSH.

In the upcoming final chapter, we're sending the Pi outside the house while staying in touch and receiving GPS and Twitter updates.