Password cracking process involves recovering a password from storage locations or from data, transmitted by a computer system on network. Password cracking term refers to group of techniques used to get password from a data system.
What is password cracking?
Purpose and reason of password cracking includes gaining an unauthorized access to a computer system or it can be recovery of forgotten password. There might be another reason of using password cracking technique that is for testing password strength so hacker could not hack into system.
Password cracking is normally performed thought repetitive process in which computer applies different combinations of password till the exact match.
Brute Force Password Cracking:
Term brute force password cracking may also be referred as brute force attack. Brute force password cracking is respective process of guessing password, in this process software or tool creates a large number of password combinations. Basically it’s a trail-and-error technique used by software to obtain password information from system.
A brute force attack are normally used by hackers when there is no chance of taking advantage of encrypted system weakness or by security analysis experts to test an organization’s network security .This method of password cracking is very fast for short length passwords but for long length passwords dictionary attack technique is normally used.
Time taken by brute force password cracking software to crack password is normally depend upon speed of system and internet connection. Louise penny books in order of publication.
GPU Password Cracking:
GPU is graphics processing unit, sometimes also called visual processing unit. Before talking about GPU password cracking we must have some understanding about hashes. When user enter password the password information stored in form of computer hashes using the one-way hashing algorithm.
In this password cracking technique using GPU software take a password guess and look through hashing algorithm and compare it or match it with the existing hashes till the exact match.
GPU can perform mathematical functions in parallel as GPU have hundreds of core that gives massive advantage in cracking password. GPU is much faster than CPU so that’s the reason of using GPU instead of CPU.
CUDA Password Cracking:
CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture is a model for programming and a platform that perform computations in parallel, created by NVIDIA for graphic processing.
CUDA Password cracking includes cracking passwords using Graphics card which have GPU chip, GPU can perform mathematical functions in parallel so the speed of cracking password is faster than CPU.GPU have many 32bit chips on it that perform this operation very quickly.
We can easily access CUDA through libraries, directives and with the help of different programming languages that includes C, C++ and FORTRAN.
Password Cracking Tools
Given below is the list of Top10 Password cracking tools.
1. Cain and Abel : Top password cracking tool for Windows
Cain & Abel is one of the top cracking tool for password cracking and password recovery for Windows OS.
Cain & Abel can use techniques of Dictionary Attack, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks to crack encrypted passwords. So it only uses the weakness of system to crack password. GUI Interface of software is very simple and easy to use. But have availability limitation, tool only available for window based systems .Cain & Abel tool have many good features some of the features of tool are discussed below:
Features of Cain & Abel:
2. John the Ripper : Multi-platform, Powerful, Flexible password cracking tool
The backyardigans ep 532. John the Ripper is a free multi or cross platform password cracking software. Its called multi platform as it combines different password cracking features into one package.
It’s primarily used to crack weak UNIX passwords but also available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. We can run this software against different password encryptions including many password hashes normally found in different UNIX versions. These hashes are DES, LM hash of Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, MD5, and AFS.
Features of John the Ripper
3. Aircrack : Fast and effective WEP/WPA cracking tool
Aircrack is a combination different tools used for Wifi, WEP and WPA passwords cracking. With the help of these tools you can crack WEP/WPA passwords easily and effectively
Brute force, FMS attack, and dictionary attacks techniques can be used to crack WEP/WPA passwords. Basically it collects and analyzes encrypted packets then using its different tool crack password out of the packets. Although aircrack is available for Windows but there are different issues with this software if we use this in Windows environment, so it’s best when we use it in Linux environment.
Features of Aircrack
4. THC Hydra : Multiple services supportive, Network authentication cracker
THC Hydra is a supper fast network password cracking tool. It uses network to crack remote systems passwords.
It can be used to crack passwords of different protocols including HTTPS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Cisco, CVS, SQL, SMTP etc. It will give you option that you may supply a dictionary file that contains list of possible passwords. It’s best when we use it in Linux environment.
Features of THC Hydra
Site for Download:
https://www.thc.org/thc-hydra/
5. RainbowCrack : New Innovation in Password Hash Cracker
RainbowCrack software uses rainbow tables to crack hashes, in other words we can say it uses process of a large-scale time-memory trade for effective and fast password cracking.
Large-scale-time-memory-trade-off is a process of computing all hashes and plain text using a selected hash algorithm. After calculations, obtained results are stored in the tables called rainbow table. Process of creating rainbow tables is very time consuming but when its done software works very fast.
Password cracking using rainbow table is faster than the normal brute force attack method. It’s available for Linux and Windows operating system.
Features of Rainbow Crack
Site for Download:
6. OphCrack : Tool for Windows password cracking
OphCrack used to crack Windows user passwords with the help of rainbow tables that are available in a bootable CD.
Ophcrack is completely free to download, Windows based password cracker that uses rainbow tables to crack Windows user passwords. It normally cracks LM and NTLM hashes. Software has simple GUI and can runs on different platforms.
Features of OphCrack
Site for Download:
http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/
7. Brutus : A brute force attack cracker for remote systemsBrute Force Password Cracker
Brutus is the fastest, most flexible, and most popular software used to crack remote system passwords. It guess password through applying different permutations or by using a dictionary.
It can be used for different network protocols including HTTP, FTP, IMAP, NNTP and other types such as SMB, Telnet etc. It also gives you facility of creating your own authentication type. It also includes extra options of load and resume, so process can be paused when required and you can resume process when you want.
It is only available for windows operation systems. Tool has a limitation that it has not been updated since 2000.
Features of Brutus
Site for Download:
8. L0phtCrack : Smart tool for Windows password recovery
Just like OphCrack tool L0phtCrack is also a Windows passwords recovery tool uses hashes to crack passwords, with extra features of Brute force and dictionary attacks.
It normally gains access to these hashes from directories, network servers, or domain controllers. It is capable of doing hash extraction from 32 & 64 bit Windows systems, multiprocessor algorithms, scheduling, and can also perform decoding and monitoring networks. Yet it is still the easiest to use password auditing and recovery software available.
Features of L0phtCrack
Site for Download:
9. Pwdump : Password recovery tool for Windows
Pwdump is actually different Windows programs that are used to provide LM and NTML hashes of system user accounts.
Pwdump password cracker is capable of extracting LM, NTLM and LanMan hashes from the target in Windows, in case if Syskey is disabled, software has the ability to extract in this condition.
Software is update with extra feature of password histories display if history is available. Extracted data will be available in form that is compatible with L0phtcrack.
Recently software is updated to new version called Fgdump as Pwdump not work fine when any antivirus program is running.
Features of Pwdump
Site for Download:
10. Medusa : Speedy network password cracking tool
Medusa is remote systems password cracking tool just like THC Hydra but its stability, and fast login ability prefer him over THC Hydra.
It is speedy brute force, parallel and modular tool. Software can perform Brute force attack against multiple users, hosts, and passwords. It supports many protocols including AFP, HTTP, CVS, IMAP, FTP, SSH, SQL, POP3, Telnet and VNC etc.
Medusa is pthread-based tool, this feature prevent unnecessarily duplicate of information. All modules available as an independent .mod file, so no modification is required to extend the list that supports services for brute forcing attack.
Dictionary Attack
Features of Medusa
Site for Download:
There are many methods hackers use to get into a computer, computer network, a website or an online service. Carrying out a Brute Force Attack is one of them. It is one of the simplest, yet time consuming method to hack a server or a normal computer. The Brute force attack mechanism has its advantages – it can also used to check network security and to recover forgotten passwords. In this post we will try and understand Brute Force Attack definition and see the basic prevention method.
Brute Force Attacks
A Brute Force Attack is a type of Cyber Attack, where you have a software spinning up different characters to create a possible password combination. The Brute Force Attack password cracker software simply uses all possible combinations to figure out passwords for a computer or a network server. It is simple and does not employ any intelligent techniques. Since it is math based, it takes less time to crack a password using brute force applications rather than figuring them out manually. I said math based because computers are good at math and perform such calculations in split seconds compared to human brains, that take it longer to create combinations.
Rdp Brute Attack
Brute Force Attack is good or bad depending upon the person using it. It could be a cyber criminal trying to hack into a network server or it could be a network admin trying to see how secure his or her network is. Some computer users also use brute force apps to recover forgotten passwords.
Speed of computing & passwords matter during Brute Force Attacks
If you are using all lower letters and no special characters or digits, it might be a work of just 2-10 minutes before a brute force attack can crack the password. However, a combination of upper case and lower case letters along with a digit (supposing there are eight digits), will take more than 14-15 years to crack the password.
It also depends upon the speed of computer processor, as to how long it takes to crack the password of network or normal login to a Windows standalone computer.
Thus it makes a lot of sense to have a strong passwords. To create really strong passwords, you can make use of ASCII characters to create stronger passwords. ASCII characters refer to all the characters available on the keyboard and more (you can see them by pressing ALT+numbers (0-255) on Numpad). There are some 255 ASCII characters and each one has a code that is read by machine and converted to binary (0 or 1) so that it can be used with computers. For example, the ASCII code for “space” is 32. When you enter a space, the computer reads it as 32 and converts it into binary – which would be 10000. These 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 are stored as ON, OFF, OFF, OFF, OFF, OFF in the computer’s memory (that is made of electronic switches). This has nothing to do with brute force except that in case of use of all ASCII characters, if you use special characters in the password, the total time taken to crack the password could run above 100 years or so. I spoke about ASCII for people who do not know how characters are stored in computer’s memory.
Here is a link to a Brute Force Password Calculator, where you can check out how long it will take to crack a password. There are different options given that include lower case letters, upper case letters, digits, and all ASCII characters. Based on what you used in your password, select the options and click on calculate to see how difficult it would be for a Brute force attack to compromise your computer or server.
Brute Force Attack Prevention & Protection
Since no special logic is applied in brute force attacks except for trying out different combinations of characters used for creation of a password, prevention on a very basic level, is relatively easy.
Apart from using a fully updated Windows operating system and security software, you should use a strong password that has some of the following characteristics:
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The lengthier a password is, the more time it will take to crack the password. If your password is something like ‘PA$$w0rd”, it will take more than a 100 years to crack it with currently available brute force attack apps. Please do not use the suggested password in example, as it is very easy to break it using some intelligent software that falls out of the realm of brute force attacks.
Our freeware PassBox is a handy little tool that will remember all your passwords and even generate strong passwords for your account – or you could use some free online password generator to create strong passwords anonymously. Having done that, test your new password with Microsoft’s Password Checker. The Password Checker evaluates your password’s strength as you type.
If you are using WordPress website software, then there are also many WordPress security plugins that automatically block brute force attacks. Using a web firewall like Sucuri or Cloudflare is another option you can consider. One way to block brute-force attacks is to lock out accounts after a defined number of failed password attempts. The Limit Logins WordPress plugin is good for stopping brute force attacks on your blog. Other measures include allowing logins from only select IP addresses, changing default login URLs to something else and using Captcha’s to harden your WordPress blog security.
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