Most of the wireless routers
today comes with some security feature such as security encryption (WEP/WPA),
MAC address filtering, lowering transmission power, disabling DHCP & use
static IP, and hiding of SSID to help keep your wireless network safe from
intruders. Each wireless security mechanism helps to increase the difficulty of
unauthorized users from hacking in to your wireless networks but surely does
not prevent the determined ones. In this article we will be focusing on one of
the option “Broadcast SSID” found in most wireless routers.
Basically when the broadcast SSID
option is enabled, all wireless capable devices can see your router listed
together with a bunch of other wireless networks. This option provides a
convenience for you to easily connect to it by clicking on your SSID and
entering the security key. However, this also allows the nearby hackers to find
your network and also see the signal strength with the security type being used
directly from Windows without even the need to run a network scanning tool. Non
broadcasting wireless networks are not totally invisible as well because they
can be detected by any of the 8 tools mentioned below.
inSSIDer is the most popular free and open source
Wi-Fi scanning tool available today. It is easy to use and understand without
all the confusing configuration. After installation, running inSSIDer will
automatically select your wireless adapter to start scanning for available access
points. Then the results will be shown in a sortable table in the program
displaying information such as SSID, channel, security, RSSI, MAC Address,
maximum rate, vendor and network type.
The hidden wireless network is shown in the first
line with an empty SSID but the rest of the information about the network is
displayed. inSSIDer works on Windows XP/Vista/7 (32-bit & 64-bit) and also
on Android and Mac.
2. WirelessNetView
Another excellent small and portable utility by
Nir Sofer called WirelessNetView allows you to view the available wireless
networks around you. By placing the OUI database at the same folder as
WirelessNetView, it can even show the brand of the wireless router based on the
MAC address. It is possible to generate a HTML report file from the right click
context menu and it also has command line support to save the list of wireless
networks into an external TXT, CSV, HTML or XML file.
The hidden wireless network is shown without a
SSID. A unique feature found in WirelessNetView is the ability to restart
Windows Wireless Service from the Options toolbar or alternatively from the
hotkey Ctrl+R. WirelessNetView works from Windows XP to Windows 7.
3. Winhotspot
Winhotspot is actually a stand alone application
that allows you to easily create a hotspot to share your Internet connection
using your wireless adapter. However it also comes with a scanner which can be
accessed from the WiFi Stats tab and clicking the Refresh button shows all the
available wireless networks including the hidden ones.
The wardriving feature is very basic that only
shows the important information such as SSID, Auth, BSSID, Signal, Radio and
Channel. This utility is only 154KB in size and works only in Windows 7 and 8.
The file is hosted in CNET’s server and you should click on the Direct Download
link instead of the big Download Now button to avoid downloading the
unnecessary 600KB CNET installer.
4. Homedale
Homedale is another portable and free wireless monitoring tool that
is capable of showing hidden wireless networks. The program is divided into
four different tabs showing an overview of your wireless adapter, access
points, signal graph and options. At the Access Points tab you can see all the
detected networks with the signal strength levels being automatically updated
every few seconds.
An interesting feature found in Homedale is the
ability to connect to the access point by right clicking on the AP and select
Connect. Unfortunately the connect command does nothing to the hidden ones
without the SSID.
5. NetSurveyor
NetSurveyor by Nuts About Nets seems to be a more
professional tool as it comes with logging to record and playback the data.
Other than that, a PDF report can also be automatically generated from the File
menu that shows the discovered networks, beacon qualities, usage of channels
and timecourse/heatmap/spectrogram of channels.
Hidden wireless networks are shown as
UNKNOWN_SSID_BSSID in the program. The channel usage bar graph instantly tells
you the overlapping channels with the colored bars. Even if your computer does
not have a wireless adapter, NetSurveyor can be ran as DEMO mode to get a feel
on how it works. NetSurveyor works from XP SP3 with Microsoft .NET Framework
version 3.5 or later.
6. Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector
Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector is biggest in file size at
21MB if compared to the rest of the scanners mentioned in this article. The
program has a modern ribbon type of user interface which seems a bit
unnecessary because it only has 1 Home tab. The program categorizes into four
different parts which is the radar, connection information, found networks and
signal history. The radar simply displays the access points closest to you.
A gadget version of the Inspector can also be
downloaded from the official website. It is free and works on Windows XP SP2 or
later, Vista, or 7.
Download
Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector7. Vistumbler
Vistumbler is a free wireless network scanner
coded in Autoit made for Vista to replace the
outdated Netstumbler. Vistumbler has been around since 2007 and an updated
version has been recently released after without updates for 2 years. The
method used by Vistumbler to scan the access point is the same as method #8
below except the results are shown in an easy to read table.
Running Vistumbler will report that an update is
available even though we’ve just downloaded the latest version. Clicking on the
Yes button will prompt an error about a variable used without being declared
and clicking OK will close the program. What you need to do is simply click No
when it ask you if you like to update vistumbler.
Download
Vistumbler
8. netsh
If you are unable to install and run any of the 7
tools above, netsh would be your best alternative. netsh is a command shell
tool by Microsoft found in Windows operating system. Simply launch command
prompt and type the following command line to get a list of wireless networks.
It is advisable to disconnect from any access points before running this
command to get a more accurate result.
netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid
The netsh command is useful because it doesn’t
require installation of third party programs but it does not come with a fancy
graphical user interface or nice looking graphs. Surprisingly the netsh tool is
able to show quite a wealth of information if compared to the third party tools
mentioned above. Do take note that if both wired and wireless are connected,
you will need to disable the wired connection first or else you’ll get the
message “There are 0 networks currently visible”.
NB: If you haven’t noticed, all of the network
scanning tools above can only discover invisible wireless networks but they
cannot reveal the hidden SSID. Most of them shows a blank SSID while only
NetSurveyor shows UNKNOWN_SSID and Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector shows Non-Broadcasted.
There are some wireless utility that is installed together with the wireless
adapter driver capable of showing hidden networks. Although the Windows
wardriving tools is unable to reveal the hidden SSID in invisible wireless
networks, it doesn’t mean that hiding SSID broadcast is safe. The hidden SSID
can be revealed by de-authenticating connected users using aireplay-ng that is
found in BackTrack Linux.
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