Bettercap is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack tool developed to for users who are likely to be penetration testers to test and improve the security of networks or some devices connected to these networks. There’s a lot of material online, especially from the official bettercap website, which document how the tool is used and some of the improvements that have been done to it over the years. This post will majorly focus on version 2.1 which is the currently stable version. One can also clone the bettercap repository on github.com to use the development release.

Betterrcap website: www.bettercap.org

Let’s quickly start with the installation process before we can go ahead and explore the numerous functionalities that come with it.

For Kali Linux users, the following commands will be sufficient to have the tool up and running on your machine:

apt-get update

apt-get install bettercap

The installation for other flavors of Linux and the Mac OS X may however require a little bit more steps as one has to download and install all the necessary dependencies before they are able to run bettercap. Execute this command to get your machine ready to install bettercap.

sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby-dev libpcap-dev

Proceed to install bettercap using the gem install GEMNAME command:

gem install bettercap

and perform an update with:

gem update bettercap

You are now all set to run bettercap and perform whichever recon operations or attacks on your network of choice. It is however advisable to use bettercap on your own or authorized network to avoid legal actions against you incase a breach is detected.

The first action is to try to find out what modules or commands are available for your use.