In security breaches, penetration of a wireless network through unauthorized access is termed as wireless cracking. There are various methods that demand high level of technological skill and knowledge, and availability of numerous software tools made it less sophisticated with minimal technological skill to crack WLANs.

1. Sniffing: It is eavesdropping on the network and is the simplest of all attacks. Sniffing is the simple process of intercepting wireless data that is being broadcasted on an unsecured network. Also termed as reconnaissance technique, it gathers the required information about the active/available Wi-Fi networks. The attacker usually installs the sniffers remotely on the victim's system and conducts activities such as.

• Passive scanning of wireless network;
• Detection of SSID;
• Colleting the MAC address;
• Collecting the frames to crack WEP.

2. Spoofing: The primary objective of this attack is to successfully masquerade the identity by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.

• MAC address Spoofing: It is a technique of changing an assigned media access control (MAC) address of a networked device to a different one. This allows the attacker to bypass the access control lists on servers or routers by either hiding a computer on a network or allowing it to impersonate another network device.

• IP Spoofing: It is a process of creating IP packets with a forged source IP address, with the purpose of concealing the identity of the sender or impersonating another computing system.

• Frame Spoofing: The attacker injects the frames whose content is carefully spoofed and which are valid as per 802.11 specifications.

3. Denial of service (DoS)

4. Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM): It refers to the scenario wherein an attacker on host A inserts A between all communications - between hosts X and Y without knowledge of X and Y.

5. Encryption cracking: It is always advised that the first step to protect wireless networks is to use WPA encryption. The attackers always devise new tools and techniques to deconstruct the older encryption technology, which is quite easy for attackers due to continuous research in this field.