- I'm often asked, David which wifi adapters
should I purchase? And do I actually need a wifi adapter to hack using Kali Linux or
Parrot OS or something else? And the answer is as
always in life, it depends. Here I've got a whole
bunch of wifi adapters, and I'm gonna discuss which
wifi adapters I would recommend. Now, before I continue,
you may have noticed that I've spent quite a bit
of money buying wifi adapters. If you find this video useful
please consider supporting me by subscribing to my YouTube
channel, by liking this video, and clicking on the bell
to get notifications, that really does help me
with the YouTube robots and helps me cover the
cost of adapters like this. Lemme know if you want me
to buy any more adapters to review, and I'll try and
buy those and discuss them. Hopefully you'll find this video useful. So again, please consider
subscribing to my YouTube channel. Okay, let's get started. (upbeat music) This is an introductory video where I discuss these wifi adapters and I'll give you my recommendation about which one to purchase. Let me know if you agree. Perhaps you have found other
wifi adapters that are better than what I'm showing you here. So please comment below and let me know if there are any wifi adapters that you think work really
well with Kali Linux or Parrot OS or something else. Now, lemme start with this question. Do you need to buy a wifi adapter? So would you need to purchase
an external wifi adapter such as this Alfa wifi
adapter or this wifi adapter? And the answer once again is, it depends. Laptops come with built-in wifi. So why can't you use the
wifi adapter in your laptop? And the answer is, often
they don't support monitor and injection mode. You're going to need to
change your wifi settings. So, as an example, if you wanna run a denial
of service attacks, such as I demonstrated in this video, you need to put this wifi
adapter into monitor mode. So it can't be in managed mode, it needs to go into monitor mode so that you can monitor traffic and you want to inject packets. So if you as an example, want to send de-authentication messages to knock a client off a wifi network, if you wanna capture
the four-way handshake if you wanna run a rogue access point, your wifi adapter needs
to support, monitor an injection mode, and often
the wifi adapters in laptops don't support those modes. Another problem is that a
lot of us will run Kali Linux or Parrot OS or something
else within a virtual machine. In this example, I'm running Kali Linux within a virtual machine on my Mac. And in this example, I'm running
it within a virtual machine on Windows. But that causes a problem. Your virtual machine won't be
able to see the wifi adapter within your laptop. It displays as an Ethernet interface rather than a wifi adapter. So you need an external
adapters like these so that your virtual machine
can see the wifi adapter to sniff and hack wifi networks. Now, if you do decide to install
Kali or Parrot OS directly on bay metal, so you running
it directly on your hardware you could use the wifi
adapter within your laptop, but that again, depends on
whether it supports monitor mode and packet injection as an example. So if you wanna set up
a rogue access point or you wanna de-auth
clients from a wifi network your network code may
simply not support that. So hopefully that answers the question of why you'd purchase one
of these wifi adapters. The next question is, which one? So here you need to make some decisions. Are you gonna purchase a wifi adapter that only supports 2.4 gigahertz? Or are you gonna purchase a wifi adapter that supports both 2.4 gigahertz
as well as five gigahertz? As an example, this Alfa adapter only supports 2.4 gigahertz. The chipset in this adapter does not support five gigahertz. So if you wanna hack 802.11a, you can't use this wifi adapter. If you sniff a bunch of wifi networks you'll only see the
2.4 gigahertz networks. You won't see five gigahertz. So that will limit what you can do. This adapter as an example
supports both 2.4 gigahertz as well as five gigahertz. So you may wanna purchase this adapter rather than this adapter
because it supports both 2.4 and five. But there's also another reason why I often recommended this adapter. And that's because this
adaptive works out of the box with Kali. On the Aircrack website, they actually recommend this adapter but they talk about the
issues with the driver. I've created a video
in the past showing you how to get this wifi
adapter working with Kali, but when I tested it on
the latest release of Kali at the time of this recording,
2021.1, that no longer works. So I'll create an
updated video showing you how to get this wifi adapter to work. So that's another consideration. Does the wifi adapter work
when you plug it into Kali? Is it easy to use? I would say this. This one works out of the box
in Kali but this one doesn't, but they both work on Parrot OS. So you may prefer to use
Parrot OS as an example rather than Kali if
you're struggling to get the wifi adapter to work within Kali. On the Aircrack website,
they recommend this adapter. So if I had to choose one adapter, I would choose one of
these three wifi adapters to work with Kali or Parrot OS. These are my three favorite wifi adapters. I found that Alfa works really well. But that being said
another consideration is are you gonna get a branded or unbranded so-called wifi adapter? This one is an Alfa wifi adapter but notice this one from WiFi
Nation, a company in the UK. It looks like an OEM version of Alfa. Now I'm not sure if it
is, but if I look at this, these look exactly the same. They also both work out of the box. So depending on where you are in the world you may struggle to get an Alfa adapter. I know a lot of people have told me that they struggle to get Alfa adapters. So maybe you'll simply look for an adapter that's unbranded if you like. Now, before we go any further, you need to ask yourself which chipset does the wifi adapter use? Now, there are various
chipsets that are used but I'm gonna concentrate on the two that are most important
for our discussion. And the first one is
the Atheros or Atheros depending on how you wanna
pronounce that, AR9271. This chipset doesn't
support five gigahertz. It only supports 2.4 gigahertz. So once again this wifi adapter has an Atheros chipset inside of it. It doesn't support five gigahertz. So don't look at the
brand of wifi adapter. Look at the chipset that it uses. The next one to look at
is the Realtek RTL8812AU, that's the chipset in this wifi adapter. We wanna know that because
this supports five gigahertz as well as 2.4 gigahertz. So looking at these two
wifi adapters once again this is an Alfa branded wifi adapter. This is a WiFi Nation wifi adapter. What I really like about the WiFi Nation adapters here in the UK is they actually come
with these little leaflets and they show you the chipset
used in the wifi adapter. So as an example, here
we've got an Atheros AR9271. That's the chipset used
in this wifi adapter. So we know immediately that this which may not
be a well-known brand, like the Alfa network
adapters has that chipset in. We know immediately that that
supports only 2.4 gigahertz and not five gigahertz. Really important to make that distinction. They also tell us that this wifi adapter has the Realtek RTL8812AU chipset. So this wifi adapter
supports five gigahertz as well as 2.4 gigahertz. So when you look at wifi
adapters such as these, don't just look at the
brand, look at the chipset. The chipset is more important
than the brand name. Now some of us may prefer
to buy a brand name. So here I've got some Panda
wifi adapters as well. You need to look at the
chipset in the Panda adapter. A lot of people like the Panda adapters. These actually have a different chipset and they support 2.4 gigahertz. Whereas this Panda adapter over here supports 2.4 as well as five gigahertz. So it's really important
that you work out the chipset used within the wifi adapter,
because that will determine whether five gigahertz is supported or only 2.4 gigahertz is supported. Make sure that you find
out about the chipset. So as an example, this
1900 adapter from Alfa has a different chipset. This is the RTL8814AU adapter. So why is that important? Because as an example, if you install drivers
on Kali for this adapter, you'll need to install different
drivers for this adapter to make it work within Kali. So it's important that you know the chipset used within the adapter. So again, that will be different to say the Panda adapter
has different chipset. Now, again, one of the considerations that I think is really important
when you're starting out, do you wanna make this
as simple as possible? This adapter is really difficult to get working within Kali. So that's a disadvantage of this adapter. These Panda adapters work
out of the box on Kali. And so does this Alfa adapter. So I think that's really important. You want adapters,
especially in the beginning that work very easily in Kali. When you learning there's so
much stuff to try and learn. You don't wanna have to struggle trying to get a network
adapter to work within Kali uninstalling drivers, and it doesn't work, and it causes you endless trouble. It's really frustrating in the beginning to try and get some of these
adapters to work in Kali. So let me state the following. This adapter doesn't work
out of the box within Kali but it does on Parrot OS, using my tests of 2020.1 of Kali and the latest release of Parrot OS. So both of these adapters are great but neither of them work
out of the box in Kali. I'll show you in a separate video how to get those installed
and working within Kali. Now a question that I'm often often asked is this TP-Link adapter. A lot of people, once
again in certain countries can't get Alfa adapters so they wanna get this TP-Link adapter. You need to be really, really careful. There are different versions
of this TP-Link adapter. You have to have a version one adapter otherwise it doesn't work. It doesn't support
monitor and injection mode because they changed the chipset. You often can't find version one adapters. Today, you're gonna get version two and version three adapters. If it's not mentioned, assume that they're using a version two or version three adapter. So unless it's explicitly mentioned, it's probably gonna be two or three which means it won't work. So, I don't recommend the TP-Link adapters but what I have done is I've
purchased both a version two which is what this one
is, and a version one. I'm still waiting for the version one, TP-Link adapter to arrive. I had to buy it from eBay. I'll create a video
showing you the differences between those two adapters. And I'll show you as an example how to set up these adapters within Kali. Now, some other considerations
when buying network adapters is can you conceal them? I mean, this network adapters
can be concealed very easily but something like this is
gonna be harder to conceal. This is gonna be more obvious
than say this adapter. So you may prefer to use this
adapter in some situations rather than that, or you may decide to take
both network adapters. So think about whether a
network adapter is obvious or if it's concealed, and
what your requirements are. Now, this network adapter,
I wouldn't recommend anymore because it's gone end of life. So I used to recommend this
adapter, but no longer, it does work out of the box with Kali. It has a different chipset however, and it's gone end of life. So I wouldn't recommend that you buy this Alfa adapter anymore. Now, when it comes to build quality, you may decide to buy a
branded adapter such as this, rather than an adapter like
this which is not branded. But in this case, I
found that both of these work just as well, and I mean the build quality of this
looks exactly the same. It looks like they just changed
the logo on the adapter. But you may come across some
third party wifi adapters where the quality isn't as good. So you may prefer to buy a branded product rather than unbranded product. You may also find that the
range of the branded products is better rather than unbranded products. So, you know, do you buy a premium product or a cheaper product? That's a decision that
you need to make as well. As an example, here's an unbranded wifi
adapter that I bought. Comes with a CD. It looks like this. You may decide to try and
buy a wifi adapter like this and try and get it working
because it's cheaper. But then again, you may struggle with the drivers for an adapter like this but some might just work out of the box. So lemme know in the comments below, if you found that any
unbranded wifi adapters work really well with Kali
or Parrot or something else. Now, another thing you may wanna consider is the range of the adapter. This adapter doesn't go, or won't have the reach or the range of let's say an adapter like this. This has an antenna which
gives it further range. But what you could do is
buy an antenna like this from Alfa or somewhere else to extend the range of the adapter. So rather than using the standard antenna, use something like this, that gives you a much further range. So here's an example
of one of the antennas that I've purchased. Let me know if you want me to
review any other wifi antennas Alfa, I know sells some others, and I'll review some
others if you want me to. But that obviously is gonna
have a much further range than some of the other antennas. This is another example of
one with a lot of antennas, gives you a lot of flexibility, so you may prefer to buy one of these. Now I was gonna talk
more about these adapters but the video is getting too long. So I'll leave it for a separate video. If you enjoyed this video,
though, please like it. Please consider subscribing
to my YouTube channel and clicking on the bell
to get notifications. I'm David Bomble, wanna
wish you all the very best. (upbeat music)
