3. What you Need - more

You are welcome to use any type of external antenna you want (or none at all), but we purchased the Mobile Patch antenna pictured in Figure 4. The suction cup bottom of the patch antenna makes it wonderful for wardriving, as you can temporarily attach it to your car windows.

Figure 4: Mobile Patch Antenna

This antenna has 8dBi of gain and, like many antennas, has a short cable that terminates in an N-Female connector. For the Senao / Engenius cards, you will need to buy a pigtail with MMCX connector on one end. The connector is about 1 mm in diameter, with a very small pin in the middle (Figure 5).

Figure 5: MMCX connector on pigtail cable

As a side note, pigtail connectors are disliked by many people. It’s an extra cable to carry around, and sometimes the connector breaks off. In addition, it is a pain to disconnect the pigtail from the Wi-Fi card, as it takes a decent amount of force to pull the connector off.

The Software

While cracking WEP requires several open source tools, all of these tools are thankfully pre-installed, on the free Backtrack CD. You download an iso CD image and burn the CD from the image. The image can be burned to a CD with any CD-burning software such as Nero (commercial) or CDBurnerXP (free). You will need to burn one CD for each of your scanning and attacking notebooks. Please donate a few bucks to the author if you find Backtrack useful! The CD boots a version of Slackware Linux into RAM (it doesn’t touch your hard-drive) and auto-detects and configures many wireless cards.