What you need for this book

To follow and recreate the practical exercises in this book, you will need two laptops with built-in Wi-Fi cards, an Alfa AWUS036H USB wireless Wi-Fi adapter, BackTrack 5, and some other hardware and software. We have detailed this in Chapter 1, Wireless Lab Setup.

As an alternative to the two laptop setup, you could also create a Virtual Machine housing BackTrack 5 and connect the card to it over the USB interface. This will help you get started with using this book much faster, but we would recommend a dedicated machine running BackTrack 5 for actual assessments in the field.

As a prerequisite, readers should be aware of the basics of wireless networks. This includes having prior knowledge about the basics of the 802.11 protocol and client access point communication. Though we will briefly touch upon some of this when we set up the lab, it is expected that the user is already aware of these concepts.