how and when to use monitor mode

How And When To Use Monitor Mode

 

In this article you will learn how and when to use Monitor mode for your network wireless adaptor. Monitor mode is a function of some wireless adaptors that will allow you to listen to  conversations that were not intended for your PC. The interception of the packets can show network traffic around without associating with any access point.

 

When To Use Monitor Mode

Monitor mode should be enabled when you want to monitor the wireless network traffic around you. This monitoring can show you all the routers and devices around you, their MAC addresses and when they are active.

There are many reasons when monitor mode could be useful, which includes discovering WiFi cameras in the area, cracking WiFi passwords spying on what time someone returns home everyday by switching on their laptop and capturing usernames and passwords sent through web browsers.

The Kali Linux tools that you will  most likely use a wireless adapter in monitor mode are Aircrack-ng suite, Kismet and Wireshark.

 
 

How To Enable Monitor Mode With Airmon-ng

First of all lets identify which mode is currently enabled on the wireless adapter. As you can see the iwconfig command shows us the adapter is in managed mode.

iwconfig

airmon-ng check will show us any processes that may interfere and cause issues.

airmon-ng check kill to kill the processes.

airmon-ng start wlan0
airmon_ng
And now we can check if the interface is in monitor mode with iwconfig

 

Enabling monitor mode with iwconfig

If the method using airmon-ng did not work for you, another way is by disabling the interface and changing it yourself.

To make any changes we must disable the interface, change to monitor mode and then activate the interface.

ifconfig wlan0 down
ifconfig wlan0 mode monitor
ifconfig wlan0 up
check_kill

 

Running the commands with Python.

Another way to enable monitor mode is with an automated python script which will run all the above commands to enable monitor mode.

				
					#!/usr/bin/env python

import subprocess

subprocess.call("ifconfig wlan0 down", shell=True)
subprocess.call("iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor", shell=True)
subprocess.call("ifconfig wlan0 up", shell=True)
print("Monitor Mode Enabled")

Screenshot showing navigation to python scripts folder and calling python monitormode.py

monitor_mode_enabled

 

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