Chapter 6:
Network Hacking Tools

The most important and complex to handle while
hacking is dealing with
networks. Network in layman terms is just a system of interconnected
networks. The Internet is the biggest network that has changed lives.
Companies and a lot of industries run with interconnected networks.
Whenever a hacker gets successful in entering a network, he will try to hack
the other subnetworks too. We will in this
chapter learn about a lot of
network concepts and commands that will make hackers crack the networks
easily. Let us go!
What is a Network?
A network is a group of systems that are bound to work together or in a
total sense used to exchange information from each of them. For the
appraisal of this definition, we use a lot of technical devices that are used to
exchange information. Some
of these devices are routers, modems,
antennas, wires and even groups of satellites that continuously track
geographic variants for the working of GPS.
Kali Linux consists of a lot of network tools that can be used to connect to
an embedded system or for being used as a server maintenance tool. We
even have used the network card configuration and wireless integration
during the installation of the operating system. In the next section, we will
discuss ifconfig one of the most important network tools that can be used to
learn about the network details that we are dealing with. All we need to do
is to send packet signals and we will learn about in detail.
ifconfig
ifconfig is usually the default command hackers use to know about the
network information. It will display a lot
of information like Ethernet
address, physical MAC address, IP address, and even the network mask.
There is also a section that describes the number of packets that are released
and received. Another line describes the collisions of network packets.
While some of them may be useless for
hackers they can be used to
determine the network strength of the system they are trying to exploit.
Below is a command and output that shows about the ifconfig in detail :
ifconfig
Here are few things that ifconfig command can do:
a) ifconfig can be used to specify the IP address with a netmask. This
command can be used when performing a wireless packet injection using
the network routers.
Here is the command
example@ linuxwar : ifconfig netmask 223.2.1.2
b) ifconfig on a whole can also be used to determine the broadcast address
that the system is on. It can be further manipulated with the deviation of the
netmask.
Here
is the command
example@ linuxwar : ifconfig broadcast 212.11.1.1
c) ifconfig can be used to end the network devices. Just like killing the
processes sometimes it becomes necessary for hackers to end the network
drivers or devices they are connected to get rid of sniffing or leaving any
traces.
Here is the command for switching off the Ethernet driver
example@ linuxwar : ifconfig eth0 212.1.1.1
In this way, we can use ifconfig to switch on or off the network drivers.
However, ifconfig often only helps us to understand the information that is
already available and will not help
us to manipulate any network
information. For this, we have to use advanced sniffing or clickjacking
software's where we can manipulate the configuration
files and resources
that are present. In the next section, we will discuss some of these complex
network manipulation tasks in detail. Follow along!