Description


The OSWA-Assistant™ is a freely-downloadable, self-contained, wireless-auditing toolkit for both IT-security professionals and End-users alike.


This toolkit is our contribution to the wireless security/auditing community and, as the "Assistant" moniker implies, and is designed for the following groups of people:

• IT-security auditors and professionals who need to execute technical wireless security testing against wireless infrastructure and clients;

  
  

• IT professionals who have responsibility for ensuring the secure operation and administration of their organization's wireless networks;

  
  

• SME (Small & Medium Enterprise) and SOHO (SmallOffice-HomeOffice) businesses who do not have either the technical expertise or the resources to employ such expertise to audit their wireless networks;

  
  

• Non-technical-users who run wireless networks at home and who would like to audit the security of their wireless home networks and laptops but don't know how.

Rationale


We found that many IT-security professionals who attended the OSWA™ certification programme frequently requested for a ready-to-use toolkit which they didn't have to install on their corporate laptops as these laptops were often governed by corporate rules on software installation. Additionally, many auditors could not re-partition their company-supplied laptop's hard drive just to install a Linux environment because of those same corporate rules.


They also complained about the user-unfriendliness of many LiveCDs available today in that they assumed that the user was a Linux expert, thus having their tools kept in different locations on the CD, or having menus for some tools while others have no menus at all, and in general not being easy to navigate or use, as well as their non-wireless-specific focus. The wireless auditors just wanted to do the job without having to go hunting all over the place for the tools. Thus, was born the specialized OSWA-Assistant™ wireless auditing toolkit, which is designed to address these gripes.


All IT-security professionals can use the OSWA-Assistant™ for wireless auditing as the toolkit is intended for wireless auditing specifically. We have also not gone down the "look ma, i've got bazillion tools" route because the name of the game here is efficiency and ease of use. The included list of tools is more than sufficient to allow the wireless auditor to complete his/her job in a thorough consistent manner without being confusing in number. In addition, some of the included applications (e.g. Probemapper™ and MoocherHunter™) have been specially designed for use as part of the OSWA-Assistant™.


But wait! You mentioned "non-technical users" above! Why release something that end-users can also use? Isn't wireless auditing supposed to be for pros only??


The reason for addressing this second group is because Home-owners and SOHO setups often do not have the money to engage qualified technical professionals to conduct wireless audits, even though they may be owning and running wireless networks. And we also don't believe that the usefulness of a LiveCD-format wireless auditing toolkit should be confined to only the technically-inclined.


Thus, the OSWA-Assistant™ also aims to empower these individuals and small businesses (who would otherwise not be able to pay a security company to audit their wireless networks or have the time to do research on their own) do basic self-help wireless auditing to find out if their wireless networks and clients have any weaknesses and to secure them before any bad guys (hackers, competitors, etc) can attack and compromise them. It does this via a ThinkSECURE-developed onboard help system called the OSWA-Assistant™ ActivityMap™, which we believe to be a first-of-its-kind-in-the-world feature for a LiveCD.





Awards

In their Best IT Security Tools for 2009 report, Security-Database.com listed the OSWA-Assistant™ as the WINNER in BOTH the "Wireless Auditing" and "Wireless Hacking" categories!

In case the above links are no longer live, you can see the report PDF here.

In their December 2007 article BEST IT Security and Auditing Softwares 2007, Security-Database.com listed the OSWA-Assistant™ as BEST in the "Wireless Testing" category and also RECOMMENDED / EXCELLENT in the "LiveCDs" category.

In case the above links are no longer live, you can see the pages of the article in these screenshots: Page1, Page2, Page3 and the Last Page.



The OSWA-Assistant™ has also been showcased and used by the Wall Of Sheep (WOS) team at both BlackHat and DEFCON (Las Vegas) in both 2008 and 2009 :


(click on picture to go to a news article at TGDaily.com)