What is Wireless Penetration Testing?

by Sarah Harvey / August 28th, 2019

The convenience and accessibility of wireless technology makes it an integral part of business today. No cords, no cables – just waves of information streaming to your device of choice. Unfortunately, wireless technology is just as susceptible to a malicious attack as any other type of technology.

From poor wireless security configurations to choosing a flawed encryption scheme, there are so many things can go wrong. How is your internal network segmented from the network you give to guests? Could your passwords be guessed by brute force? How easily could wardriving efforts compromise your network? That’s what we are here to find out during wireless penetration testing.

Testing Wireless Security Configurations

The objective of wireless penetration testing is to test wireless security configurations, which could be the attack vector for gaining access to internal assets. At KirkpatrickPrice, we want to find the gaps in your wireless security configurations before an attacker does, which is why we offer advanced, wireless penetration testing.

Some of the most common vulnerabilities that we look for when testing wireless security configurations include:

Lack of Physical Boundaries Leading to Accidental Associations
Rogue or Easily Accessible Access Points
Untrained Users
Vendor-Supplied Defaults
Easy to Eavesdrop and/or Sniff
No Wireless Network Monitoring
Unauthorized, Slow Data Rates
Misconfigured Firewalls
Susceptibility to Wardriving
WEP Weakness
MAC Spoofing
Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
DoS Attacks

Could your wireless technology be vulnerable to these risks? How are you validating the security efforts over your wireless networks? If you haven’t considered wireless penetration testing before, it may be time.

How is Wireless Penetration Testing Performed?

Let’s say a company has a wireless network exclusively for employees and one for guests. To test the wireless security configurations, our task would be to first try to break into that internal wireless network from the outside. If we can gain access, our next goal is to see if we can find a way into their internal infrastructure. If the company also has a guest network, our next step is to test the wireless security configurations for that network as well. Is the guest network open to the public? Are the credentials given to authorized guests once they enter your building? Could the password be compromised via brute force? Is it too similar to the password for your employees’ network (like Guest2013 versus Employee2013)? Our penetration testers have been in this scenario time and time again. Once a penetration tester gains a password, they can sniff the network on the guest wireless and perform SSL stripping attacks to gather user credentials. From there, they find even more types access.

To thoroughly test wireless security configurations, our penetration testers will try any avenue to gain access and then see if we, again, can we bleed into any other networks or infrastructure.

Our job as your expert penetration tester is to perform the role of the attacker and assess the wireless security configurations for vulnerabilities that could lead to catastrophic consequences. Effective wireless penetration testing requires a diligent effort to find weaknesses, just like a hacker would. If you want to avoid the consequences of compromised wireless technology and work with an expert ethical hacker, contact us today.