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If you find yourself troubleshooting network issues, and you have to inspect individual packets, you need to use Wireshark. Wireshark is the de facto, go-to, you-need-to-know-how-to-use, application to capture and investigate network traffic.

The ESP8266 microcontroller is a cheap, powerful IoT module with embedded Wi-Fi, which can be programmed in a number of popular languages. On the Security Tools podcast, we explore some of Stefan Kremser’s popular Wi-Fi hacking tools based on the ESP8266.

OSINT stands for open source intelligence and refers to the practice of collecting data from free sources that are available to the general public. As information becomes more available from a vast number of sources, skilled researchers can often find nearly any type of data they’re looking for, provided they know where to look. These sources include both public and private databases that hackers, journalists, spies, and ordinary people all use to do the work of collecting information every day.

A honeypot is a tool that acts as bait, luring an attacker into revealing themselves by presenting a seemingly tempting target. While advanced honeypots are designed to make it easier to detect and study the kinds of attacks hackers use in the wild, modern honeypots based on tracking URL’s have evolved to be so flexible and user-friendly that average people often use them to identify online scammers.

While Wi-Fi offers the convenience of a seamless, untethered data connection, it comes with security disadvantages that hackers love to exploit. Without knowing the tricks hackers use to target Wi-Fi devices, it’s hard for users to know which habits may be putting them most at risk.

Hackers do their homework when picking a target, often relying on information left publically exposed to make decisions about how to attack. Whether an OSINT researcher is a hacker looking for vulnerabilities to exploit or an analyst assessing exposure, their core task is to combine public data into an intimate understanding of a business target.