How To Hack WiFi With Windows

 

Perhaps you forgot the password on your own network, or don't have neighbors willing to share their WiFi. This guide will show you how to hack wifi on a Windows PC.

Windows Commands to Get the Security Key

This trick works to recover a Wi-Fi network password only if you've forgotten a previously used password.

It works because Windows creates a profile of every Wi-Fi network to which you connect. If you tell Windows to forget the network, it also forgets the password. In that case, this won't work. But few people ever explicitly do that.

It requires that you go into a Windows Command Prompt with administrative privileges. Click the Star Menu, type "cmd" (no quotes), and the menu will show a Command Prompt; right-click that entry and select Run as administrator. That'll open the black box full of text with the prompt inside—it's the line with a right-facing arrow at the end, probably something like C:\WINDOWS\system32\>. A blinking cursor will indicate where you type. Start with this:

netsh wlan show profile

The results will bring up a section called User Profiles—those are all the Wi-Fi networks (aka WLANs, or wireless local area networks) you've accessed and saved. Pick the one you want to get the password for, highlight it, and copy it. At the prompt below, type the following, but replace the Xs with the network name you copied; you only need the quotation marks if the network name has spaces in it.

netsh wlan show profile name="XXXXXXXX" key=clearIn the new data that comes up, look under Security Settings for the line Key Content. The word displayed is the Wi-Fi password or key you are missing. (If you don't like the command line, there's third-party password recovering software like Cain & Abel or WirelessKeyView that can help you do the same thing.)

Crack the Code

You didn't come here because the headline said "reset the router," though. You want to know how to crack the password on a Wi-Fi network.

Searching on "wi-fi password hack," or other variations, nets you a lot of links—mostly for software on sites where the adware and bots and scams pour like snake oil. The same goes for the many, many YouTube videos promising you ways to crack a password by visiting a certain website on your phone.

Download those programs or visit those sites at your own risk. 

Kali Linux

You could create a system just for this kind of thing, or maybe dual-boot into a separate operating system that can do what's called "penetration testing"—a form of offensive approach security, where you examine a network for any and all possible paths of a breach. Kali Linux is a Linux distribution built for just that purpose.

Aircrack

Aircrack has been around for years, going back to when Wi-Fi security was only based on WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). WEP was weak even back in the day; it was supplanted in 2004 by WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access).

Aircrack-ng is labeled as a "suite of tools to assess Wi-Fi network security," so it should be part of any network admin's toolkit. It will take on cracking WEP and WPA-PSK keys. It comes with full documentation and is free, but it's not simple.

To crack a network, you need to have the right kind of Wi-Fi adapter in your computer, one that supports packet injection. You need to be comfortable with the command line and have a lot of patience. Your Wi-Fi adapter and Aircrack have to gather a lot of data to get anywhere close to decrypting the passkey on the network you're targeting. It could take a while.