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Airmon-ng Description

Airmon-ng is included in the aircrack-ng package and is used to enable and disable monitor mode on wireless interfaces. It may also be used to go back from monitor mode to managed mode.

Source: Airmon-ng Wiki
Airmon-ng Homepage | Kali aircrack-ng Repo

  • Author: Thomas d’Otreppe, Original work: Christophe Devine
  • License: GPLv2
airmon-ng – POSIX sh script designed to turn wireless cards into monitor mode.
root@kali:~# airmon-ng --help

usage: airmon-ng <start|stop|check> <interface> [channel or frequency]

airmon-ng Usage Examples

Entering the airmon-ng command without parameters will show the interfaces status.

root@kali:~# airmon-ng

PHY Interface   Driver      Chipset

phy0    wlan0       ath9k_htc   Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n

A number of processes can interfere with Airmon-ng. Using the check option will display any processes that might be troublesome and the check kill option will kill them for you.

root@kali:~# airmon-ng check

Found 3 processes that could cause trouble.
If airodump-ng, aireplay-ng or airtun-ng stops working after
a short period of time, you may want to run 'airmon-ng check kill'

   PID Name
   465 NetworkManager
   515 dhclient
  1321 wpa_supplicant

root@kali:~# airmon-ng check kill

Killing these processes:

   PID Name
   515 dhclient
  1321 wpa_supplicant

Enable monitor mode (start) on the given wireless interface (wlan0), fixed on channel 6. A new interface will be created (wlan0mon in our case), which is the interface name you will need to use in other applications.

root@kali:~# airmon-ng start wlan0 6


PHY Interface   Driver      Chipset

phy0    wlan0       ath9k_htc   Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n

        (mac80211 monitor mode vif enabled for [phy0]wlan0 on [phy0]wlan0mon)
        (mac80211 station mode vif disabled for [phy0]wlan0)

The stop option will destroy the monitor mode interface and place the wireless interface back into managed mode.

root@kali:~# airmon-ng stop wlan0mon

PHY Interface   Driver      Chipset

phy0    wlan0mon    ath9k_htc   Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n

        (mac80211 station mode vif enabled on [phy0]wlan0)

        (mac80211 monitor mode vif disabled for [phy0]wlan0mon)

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