Cracking WPA2 WPA with Hashcat in Kali Linux (BruteForce MASK based attack on Wifi passwords)

Capture handshake with WiFite

Why WiFite instead of other guides that uses Aircrack-ng? Because we don’t have to type in commands..

Type in the following command in your Kali Linux terminal:

wifite –wpa

You could also type in

wifite wpa2

If you want to see everything, (wep, wpa or wpa2, just type the following command. It doesn’t make any differences except few more minutes

wifite

Once you type in following is what you’ll see.

So, we can see bunch of Access Points (AP in short). Always try to go for the ones with CLIENTS because it’s just much faster. You can choose all or pick by numbers. See screen-shot below

Awesome, we’ve got few with clients attached. I will pick 1 and 2 cause they have the best signal strength. Try picking the ones with good signal strength. If you pick one with poor signal, you might be waiting a LONG time before you capture anything .. if anything at all.

So I’ve picked 1 and 2. Press Enter to let WiFite do it’s magic.

Once you press ENTER, following is what you will see. I got impatient as the number 1 choice wasn’t doing anything for a LONG time. So I pressed CTRL+C to quit out of it.

This is actually a great feature of WIfite. It now asks me,

What do you want to do?

1. [c][/c]ontinue attacking targets
2. [e]xit completely.

I can type in c to continue or e to exit. This is the feature I was talking about. I typed c to continue. What it does, it skips choice 1 and starts attacking choice 2. This is a great feature cause not all routers or AP’s or targets will respond to an attack the similar way. You could of course wait and eventually get a respond, but if you’re just after ANY AP’s, it just saves time.

And voila, took it only few seconds to capture a handshake. This AP had lots of clients and I managed to capture a handshake.

This handshake was saved in /root/hs/BigPond_58-98-35-E9-2B-8D.cap file.

Once the capture is complete and there’s no more AP’s to attack, Wifite will just quit and you get your prompt back.

Now that we have a capture file with handshake on it, we can do a few things.

Cleanup your cap file using wpaclean

Next step will be converting the .cap file to a format cudaHashcat or oclHashcat or Hashcat on Kali Linux will understand.

Here’s how to do it:

To convert your .cap files manually in Kali Linux, use the following command

wpaclean <out.cap> <in.cap>

Please note that the wpaclean options are the wrong way round. <out.cap> <in.cap> instead of <in.cap> <out.cap> which may cause some confusion.

In my case, the command is as follows:

wpaclean hs/out.cap hs/BigPond_58-98-35-E9-2B-8D.cap

Convert .cap file to .hccap format

We need to convert this file to a format cudaHashcat or oclHashcat or Hashcat on Kali Linux can understand.

To convert it to .hccap format with “aircrack-ng” we need to use the -J option

aircrack-ng <out.cap> -J <out.hccap>

Note the -J is a capitol J not lower case j.

In my case, the command is as follows:

aircrack-ng hs/out.cap -J hs/out