AirSnort

The home page for the free cracking application, AirSnort, plainly states, "AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys." AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. In even more simplistic terms, AirSnort is a program that listens to the wireless radio transmissions of a network and gathers them into a meaningful manner. After enough time has passed (sometimes in a matter of hours) and data are gathered, analytical tools process the data until the network security is broken. At that point everything that crosses the network can be read in plain text.

The authors of this fully functional encryption-cracking tool have maintained from the first days of release it would expose the true threats of WEP encryption. Jeremy Bruestle, one of two lead programmers for the project, has truly recognized the inherent dangers of WEP. He states during an interview in 2001, “It is not obvious to the layman or the average administrator how vulnerable 802.11b is to attack. It's too easy to trust WEP.” AirSnort is not the only open-source tool used for wireless cracking but the first publicly recognized freeware to put the power of an intellectually skilled-criminal into the hands of a neighbor, who just got the cheapest deal from the local ISP.