tetra product review. [just... don't]

[hakcrap]

 

As a brand new recipient of a tetra, i have just wasted 2 days with it. woeful product.
2.6.2 is useless. doesn't always scan, doesn't save ssid. does less than my smartphone.
obviously so many complaints from others too, but as long as hak5 are 'excited' to
release it i guess. thats really great. good work. a shame they don't use their own stuff.

down(?)graded to the tetra recovery of 2.4.x. scans much better, even saves/shows ssid, but no associations
ever occur. ever. deauths don't work either.

the only thing that does seem to work is the open ssid from the networking options. wow!

no replies required. no comments about.. oh but have you checked your filters.. *sigh*. please.
have tried many combinations of pineAP start at boot/not start, restart pineAP, factory reset, modules,
no modules. cannot find a combination that works. shouldn't be this hard.

useless useless product.

binned.

/rant

 

 

[APToni]

On 2/29/2020 at 9:40 AM, hakcrap said:

As a brand new recipient of a tetra, i have just wasted 2 days with it. woeful product.
2.6.2 is useless. doesn't always scan, doesn't save ssid. does less than my smartphone.
obviously so many complaints from others too, but as long as hak5 are 'excited' to
release it i guess. thats really great. good work. a shame they don't use their own stuff.

down(?)graded to the tetra recovery of 2.4.x. scans much better, even saves/shows ssid, but no associations
ever occur. ever. deauths don't work either.

the only thing that does seem to work is the open ssid from the networking options. wow!

no replies required. no comments about.. oh but have you checked your filters.. *sigh*. please.
have tried many combinations of pineAP start at boot/not start, restart pineAP, factory reset, modules,
no modules. cannot find a combination that works. shouldn't be this hard.

useless useless product.

binned.

/rant

I thought I had one such problem, it did not work properly after installing the modules. Like a good dummy router stand.

[Irukandji]

11 hours ago, UserNameHere said:

If you don't want anyone but l33t haxx0rz to use your shit, then don't sell it, put it on github with all the other e-hipsters.

/facepalm

[X00Gendo]

Yeah there is no way I would take this into an engagement. I REALLY want to Pineapple to work, and I really wish it would. But it can't do 50% of the things it is supposed to out of the box, and I am not talking about 3rd party modules, The bread and butter of what the Pineapple should do is:

1. Enumerate APs and clients associated to those APs

2. Capture and broadcast the SSIDs of the APs it has discovered

3. Deauth clients in order to get them to connect to the Pineapple's rogue SSIDs.

 

It does point 1 perfectly. Points 2 and 3, not so much. 

2. It can't even properly take an SSID and load it into the pool without corrupting the name. This is just poor coding. 

3. It cannot dauth anything. I mean nothing. I made a small deauther using a Nodemcu Amica, and it works better than the Pineapple, and it didn't cost 200USD. 

 

I own several Rubber Duckies and those are excellent pentesting tools, so long as you write your scrips and customise your attacks depending on your target. I cannot say the same for the Pineapple. Much hype, little delivery. It's actually disappointing that Darren refuses to acknowledge this problem. 

[TheMax]

I hear you. Having fun with this useless device myself for the last 2 days.

I'm experiencing the exact same issues and intermittently being locked out form connecting via management or the pineapple AP. My 2 laptops now report "unrecognized" USB device when connected via the Y cable. This worked just fine only yesterday. No luck connecting via the Ethernet port either.

The tetra is a very unstable half backed device. I've just requested a return/refund. Let see what I get in response.

 

[JeffP]

On 5/24/2020 at 3:41 PM, X00Gendo said:

 Much hype, little delivery. It's actually disappointing that Darren refuses to acknowledge this problem. 

Exactly same sentiment here. Spent $200 on something that won't work. (In my case, it's stuck on "...still booting" screen with any SSH connection refused).

My first thought was "Okay, I'll chance another $200 if they won't help." But hell, seeing all these problems with no resolution -- another $200 would be a guaranteed waste.

[Dirkjan]

I agree with all of you here. This product is much over hyped and it is frustrating to say the least. I bought this a few days back and I wished I had read all the feedback before I purchased it. I wished I had read this blog post about how the Wifi Pineapple is a total sham https://medium.com/@dephekt/a-review-of-the-pineapple-tetra-and-hak5-7198a98d8990   I hope the community realizes that hak5 is just swindling people their money with this bullshit product. I paid this out of my own pocket and I cant use this on any engagement. Feeling dejected and frustrated.  Shame on you Hak5 for this lousy Wifi Pineapple Tetra product.

[BlackOp]

Same experience  here on the functionality of the product. Such a shame.

Product testing- UAT etc. Seems to have been left out of the development cycle. 

My Tetra is just an ornament to what might have been. On my third Pineaple product- none works as advertised.

My $45 deauther in wrist watch form is far better to death- like it does it when I set it to do so 😉 Radical huh.

[Irukandji]

@Darren Kitchen
I think that you need to look at at this.

[L07TB0Y]

On 6/29/2020 at 6:31 AM, Jtyle6 said:

 

I had a tetra for a while and can never get it to work reliably the most it did was troll people with fake SSIDs. I have bought most of this stuff as my Job paid for it but the only slightly useful thing out of all Hak5 is rubber ducky.

[Ven0mRat]

What do you think about bashbunny? Is it better than rubber ducky? I have bashbunny and I think about buying rubber ducky.

[Ven0mRat]

And I have tetra too, you have a right this is a sh*t

[Jelnar Debs]

should i not buy?? 

[JeffP]

7 hours ago, Jelnar Debs said:

should i not buy?? 

Correct - don't buy. I (finally) out of frustration literally threw my tetra in the garbage.

[Irukandji]

7 hours ago, JeffP said:

Correct - don't buy. I (finally) out of frustration literally threw my tetra in the garbage

You could of returned it. Because you just through some money in the bin.

[Struthian]

What I find interesting about this kind of complaint , valid or invalid as it might be, there is no methodical description of use case, process by which you tried to fulfill that use case and problems you encountered with doing so.   Any kind of product that has some complexity will be frustrating without effort.  "No replies required" and yet, there is a post? Why? 

I am reminded of a recent thread on a Ham Radio board where someone complained of a fiber glass telescoping pole.  These are intended to get a thin, light weight piece of wire up vertically (20-50' depending on model)  in the air.  They are themselves very light in weight (a few pounds) and (if you know what you are doing and watched the video) easy to put up.  So the guy called it junk.  When asked what he did with it, he put a complex 12 pound antenna on it (something the instructions said not to do), erected it the opposite of the instructions and it broke.  Well - that was predictable and not surprising.

When I do complain about  a product, I am imagining myself as the guy who designed it, probably thought it was useful.  I also realize that the product sells, someone is buying it and finding it useful. Why?  My complaint is for review, for the developer to consider how to make it better or, perhaps to find out that there were other things that are useful to do with it or ways to do things - NOTHING LIKE THAT IN THIS THREAD!  Limited remarks on what they think it does (deauth wrist watch) are just that - limited.  Bringing something to an engagement is not for looks - it is to accomplish a task you agreed to get done.  What is it?  Not stated.

[Bob123]

Nicely put Struthian!  I've tried to help out in other parts of this forums when someone is unhappy with a product and I typically get crickets.  So I don't think they are truly looking for help.  They're just not happy that it doesn't work out of the box.  And if I'm wrong by saying that then let's all work together and make it work the way we want.

JeffP, if it's still in the garbage can I have it?  Thanks.

[Struthian]

One use case the Pineapple does not have is to smash into every wifi device without reason or purpose.  The purpose of all Hak5 products is to describe poor or thoughtless configurations so that the rightful owners can fix that.  Often Wifi devices are configured so that they can't be so easily attacked.  One example would be a target that does not have multiple configured access points. That limits what is possible.

If the Pineapple is used carefully and as described and still "does not work" - then the target is secure from what the Tetra does.  If someone has a fantasy of pranking all their neighbors, that's really not what pen testing is.

If you want to test a Hak5 product without harm to others, configure some devices and try attacking them.  That's a great way to learn and to develop skills in an ethical way.

[kuyaya]

On 7/5/2020 at 4:57 PM, JeffP said:

Correct - don't buy. I (finally) out of frustration literally threw my tetra in the garbage.

What a dumb desicion. You could've sent it to me instead of wasting it, I'd pay for it....

[Spargel]

i personally feel a lot of these complaints are like a person who drives an automatic transmission car and then gets behind a manual transmission and has to learn to shift and change gears but instead gets really mad at the car and complains about how the car was made wrong and all the issues are because of the manufacturers and designers.  "The manual transmission didn't automatically shift gears for me, this car is broken, what a piece of junk, I'm throwing this car away!"... 

I only say that because, personally, i've had nothing but good experiences with the tetra (and the nano) and I'm not a computer or networking whiz-kid.

i am not associated or affiliated  with HAK5 in anyway, i'm just some guy that enjoys the products they put out and has personally found the products very useful.

and benefit of the doubt, maybe some people really do have defective pineapples and it's not just user-error causing the problems.

[JohnXovox]

I've had this product all of a day and had one issue with it (the video intro said the tetra could run off of 2 USB 3.0 cables, but it needed the regular power Took me about 1.5 hours to troubleshoot). Since then it's worked great. I tested it at work and it was able to deauth clients fine, set up fake AP's, intercepted, etc.

I had a great experience with the Nano but wanted a more static system with more range and power at the office for demonstrations and configuration testing. So I got mine when it was on sale. Part of the problem I saw with the nano and I'm guessing is with the Tetra is when you load up module after module, there are occasionally bound to be conflicts. As much as things like the rubberducky/shark/bashbunny/etc are considered consumer devices and the expectation is plug and play, you have to fine tune these devices sometimes. And sometimes that means digging through logs, contacting authors, and fine tuning it. Sometimes you have to sing for your dinner.

Will it work like Pineapple V5 in 2011ish when people would routinely connect to guest networks with http and SSL was still being widely used and you could grab session ID's and do full replay? No. 802.11 has improved dramatically since then, closing vulnerabilities while opening up other vulnerabilities as it always will (like WPA Pin Guessing vs PMKID). Like metasploit, it's a platform. You have to tweak it. Make it your own. Stop thinking it as a Can-O'-Sploit. It only works slightly like that.

And as to the complaints of "I can make it myself!" Can you make it yourself? Maybe. But you didn't. And you could, but you're still complaining. You could order hardware and build your own platform, and support it yourself, and load all the tools you want, absolutely. And with time, research and materials, is it going to be worth the same cost? No. It will probably be more. Can you put the same thing up on a laptop and do it yourself? Sure. But then you have to make an expenditure for a laptop which is far more expensive, including your time. Can you do it with raspberry pi? Sure, but the Raspberry Pineapple is kind of dodgy. tl:dr: It's a tradeoff.

The Pineapples aren't perfect, no product is. There's trade-offs for everything. I can understand frustrations when it doesn't work out of the box, reality doesn't meet your expectations, but after reading through so many of these same very very dramatic complaints, I have an urge to re-read the more dramatic ones in Greek Tragedy Style.

J

[Darren Kitchen]

@JohnXovox thanks for reminding me that the setup video incorrectly recommends using USB for power. That video is very old and needs to be updated. Insufficient power is the #1 cause for issues with the device (aside from general misunderstandings of how filters & ICS work). I'll update the documentation.

We pride ourselves on our ability to provide a robust platform that's effective out of the box, while also allowing for third party development. Some of the most exciting features have come from the community through their module contributions. That said, it is impossible for our small team to test and maintain every module - so they are provided on an as-is basis. 

[N0thing]

Anyone have any idea why the tetra is now showing up as an unrecognizable device in Windows 10 when it was working fine previously?  Uart connection works fine and everything seems to be alright.  Windows Realtek drivers are all up to date.  Dmesg not showing anything odd.

[Waspandy]

I bought my Pineapple Tetra 2018 and have used it a lot in the three years since. Several of the complaints in this thread are fully justified, and Hak5 should really do something about the software. It could use a rewrite to improve stability, and something should be done to improve the functionality of modules. But apart from this, it is a very powerful tool IF you have the knowledge to handle it. One of the problems is that it is sold as requiring little to no knowledge of Unix, network configuration and programming. This is very far from reality. It takes quite an effort and knowledge to tweak it to perform optimally, but it can be done. In a thread a while ago (before I joined) someone asked if anyone ever used the Pineapple on actual assigments. I do, and it has earned its price many, many times over the past three years. Not as a single do-all outfit, but as a versatile tool in a complex tool-chain.