Hi again, Just wanted to share a neat little code that I found way back, when I was presented with a spreadsheet which was locked and asked to ''unlock'' it or do whatever it takes to enable the user to edit it's contents. Well, I'm not one to say nay to a challenge, however ...more
Everybody knows not to store sensitive information in unencrypted files, right? PDFs and ZIP files can often contain a treasure trove of information, such as network diagrams, IP addresses, and login credentials. Sometimes, even certain files that are encrypted aren't safe fro ...more
Microsoft Office files can be password-protected in order to prevent tampering and ensure data integrity. But password-protected documents from earlier versions of Office are susceptible to having their hashes extracted with a simple program called office2john. Those extracted ...more
Learn how to use the Backtrack Linux distro and the Aircrack-ng WiFi security app to crack a WEP key. The process is simple. For more information, including step-by-step instructions, and to get started testing the security of your own WiFi networks, watch this hacker's how-to.
Despite the security concerns that have plagued Facebook for years, most people are sticking around and new members keep on joining. This has led Facebook to break records numbers with over 1.94 billion monthly active users, as of March 2017 — and around 1.28 billion daily act ...more
Did you forget your Windows XP password or do you just want to see what is on your parents account? This tutorial will teach you how to find out someone's Windows XP password.
Tutorial showing how to crack the admin password on Windows XP using two downloadable tools. Crack a Windows XP admin password. Click through to watch this video on tricklife.com
If you have any doubt about how secure that strong password you created really is, there's an easy way to check online. Just visit HowSecureIsMyPassword.net, which uses a combination of math and statistics to determine how long it would take for a PC to crack your password. It ...more
Been hacked once? Twice? Maybe more? You thought abc123 was the only password that is both 6 characters wide and easy to remember? I have some suggestions in store for you. Just read on... An Introduction There are passwords that look tremendously sexy (as opposed to gibberi ...more
More password cracking action from Null Byte! Today we aren't going to be cracking passwords per se, rather, we are going to learn the basics of generating rainbow tables and how to use them. First, let's go over how passwords are stored and recovered. Passwords are normally ...more
This is a great tutorial on how to use Backtrack 2 to crack a local computer for access. You can either completely change the password or you can wipe it and restore the password so nobody knows you were there Part 1 of 3 - How to Crack local passwords for access to a computer ...more
You may have asked yourself, "How do hackers take my password, if the website owner can't?" The answer is simple. When a website stores your login password for the site, it is run through a cryptographic hash function before it enters the database (if the website isn't Sony). ...more
How to Crack Passwords Faster by Putting Your GPU to Work with HashcatSecurity on the internet is always changing. Not too long ago, having a 10 character password meant that you were safe from all forms of hash cracking. Hash cracking is when you take a string of characters t ...more
A flaw in WPS, or WiFi Protected Setup, known about for over a year by TNS, was finally exploited with proof of concept code. Both TNS, the discoverers of the exploit and Stefan at .braindump have created their respective "reaver" and "wpscrack" programs to exploit the WPS vul ...more
This episode of Full Disclosure demonstrates how to hack/crack MD5 password hashes. MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a hash function commonly used by websites to encrypt passwords. MD5 is a one-way hash; therefore, to crack the password you most try every possible dictionar ...more
In this tutorial, we learn how to make a safe password. Passwords are essential, and need to be safe for when browsing around the internet. Other people aren't meant to be able to nose around your information, so protect your information with an indecipherable password. Don't ...more
I have had a lot of people ask me, "How does my neighbor keep getting into my wireless?!". Chances are, these people are all using WEP, a deprecated wireless encryption protocol. Either that, or you are using one weak WPA passphrase. If someone can access your wireless networ ...more
In this clip, you'll learn how to use the Backtrack 3 Linux distro and Aircrack-ng WiFi security app to crack the password to a WEP-protected wireless network. The process is simple. For more information, including step-by-step instructions, and to get started testing the secu ...more
Following the first part in this series on advanced cracking techniques, we are going to go over how we can intelligently crack passwords using the old-fashioned bruteforce method. These unique cracking techniques aren't widely used, because most crackers are Script Kiddies wh ...more
What do you do with a password protected WinRAR archive? You hack it - naturally. And how do you hack it? First, download RAR Password Recovery v1.1 RC17 then follow along with this video to crack almost any WinRAR password. So much for security.
Have an old-school tabula recta lying around? No? Then just print out the chart below. Nothing ensures better password security than this centuries-old cipher technique. Here's how it works, via Wikipedia: "Using a tabula recta, each alphabet is shifted one letter to the left ...more
This Null Byte is a doozey. On Sunday, September 19th, an exploit for the latest Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" was discovered by Patrick Dunstan. This exploit allows for an attacker, even remotely, to request to have the root user's password changed without knowing the password to the ...more
I've seen numerous tutorials on how to create a "strong" password. This makes me laugh. These titles imply "one" password, which is wrong in and of itself. A person should have many passwords, all different, and all extremely long. People may ask how they're supposed to rememb ...more
This past Sunday, a group called Gnosis launched a massive hacker attack on Gawker media, one of the web's most popular blog networks (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot). 1.3 million registered users' passwords were compromised, and 188 ...more
How did it happen? How did your ultra-secure WPA password on your wireless network get broken into? Well, you might have just found yourself at the mercy of a cracker. Crackers are malicious computer users who specialize in breaking into things. Whether it be passwords, login ...more
There are loads of reasons for somebody to want to recover a Windows password, and there are lots of different ways of doing it. My favorite of all of these ways is to use a piece of software called Ophcrack because: The free tables are suitable for almost all uses (I've neve ...more
Whatever your reasons for doing it, if you are trying to hack passwords, it helps to have the right software for getting the job done. With the Cain and Abel program, you will be well on your way to hacking even the toughest personal passwords. Visit us at bleedingedgesecurit ...more
Six months ago, 1.3 million registered users of Gawker Media had their passwords compromised when the site was hacked by Gnosis. The passwords were encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made publicly available for all to see. Just three weeks ago, Sony Pictures was h ...more
Our mission for this week's Community Byte was to create a Python program to crack web-based passwords, like the ones you would see on an email or router login. I wanted it to be universal in the sense that it could be easily modified and adapted to another website just by cha ...more
Brutus, first made available in 1998, is one of the fastest, most flexible remote brute-force password crackers you can get your hands on - it's also free. It is available for Windows 9x, NT and 2000. In this video tutorial, you'll learn how to use Brutus to crack a Linux box ...more
Have you ever forgotten your password and didn't know how to get back on your computer? Or ever had an annoying roommate you wanted to play a trick on to teach them a lesson? Or perhaps overly religious parents who think the internet is of the devil and won't let you read onli ...more
When Windows stores a password, it is done so by hashing the password in an LM hash and putting it in the Windows SAM file. In the scary moment that you lose your password, but don't want to pay some geek to have full root access to your computer, you need to recover it using ...more
Welcome to another Community Byte announcement! In the past two sessions, we have coded an IRC bot in Python capable of issuing commands. Since it can issue commands and most of you are new to programming, that project will stay idle for a while. Other commands such as voice a ...more
This weekend, hackers broke into the servers of the popular shoe shopping site Zappos, giving them access to the personal information of 24 million Zappos customers. The user data taken included names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last fo ...more
Welcome back, my hacker apprentices! Last week, I started off my password cracking series with an introduction on the principles and technologies involved in the art of cracking passwords. In past guides, I showed some specific tools and techniques for cracking Windows, onlin ...more
Welcome back, my novice hackers! In a recent tutorial, I showed how the SNMP protocol can be a gold mine of information for reconnaissance on a potential target. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest that you read it before progressing here, as little of this will make m ...more
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! I have already done a few tutorials on password cracking, including ones for Linux and Windows, WEP and WPA2, and even online passwords using THC Hydra. Now, I thought it might be worthwhile to begin a series on password cracking in general. ...more
Welcome back, my hacker novitiates! In an earlier tutorial, I had introduced you to two essential tools for cracking online passwords—Tamper Data and THC-Hydra. In that guide, I promised to follow up with another tutorial on how to use THC-Hydra against web forms, so here we ...more
Cracking the password for WPA2 networks has been roughly the same for many years, but a newer attack requires less interaction and info than previous techniques and has the added advantage of being able to target access points with no one connected. The latest attack against t ...more
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! Several of you have written me asking how to crack passwords. The answer, in part, depends upon whether you have physical access to the computer, what operating system you are running, and how strong the passwords are. In this first install ...more
Welcome back, my apprentice hackers! In this series on password cracking, I have been attempting to develop your skills in the age-old art of password cracking. Although it might seem like a simple and straightforward exercise, those of you who have attempted password crackin ...more
Welcome back, my eager hackers! In recent blogs, I've demonstrated how to grab password hashes remotely using Metasploit's meterpreter and pwdump. Once we have the Windows passwords from the SAM file, we can then crack these hashes using tools such as Cain and Abel. In this ...more
Hashes are commonly used to store sensitive information like credentials to avoid storing them in plaintext. With tools like Hashcat, it's possible to crack these hashes, but only if we know the algorithm used to generate the hash. Using a tool called hash-identifier, we can e ...more
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers. When Wi-Fi was first developed in the late 1990s, Wired Equivalent Privacy was created to give wireless communications confidentiality. WEP, as it became known, proved terribly flawed and easily cracked. You can read more about that in my b ...more
Welcome, my hacker novitiates! As part of my series on hacking Wi-Fi, I want to demonstrate another excellent piece of hacking software for cracking WPA2-PSK passwords. In my last post, we cracked WPA2 using aircrack-ng. In this tutorial, we'll use a piece of software develop ...more
Welcome back, my rookie hackers! A short while back, I began a new series on database hacking, and now it's time to continue and extend your education in that field. As you know, the database contains all of the most valuable info for the hacker, including personally identifi ...more
Pyrit is one of the most powerful WPA/WPA2 cracking tools in a hacker's arsenal, with the ability to benchmark a computer's CPU speeds, analyze capture files for crackable handshakes, and even tap into GPU password-cracking power. To demonstrate how quickly it can hack a WPA/W ...more
Welcome back, my rookie hackers! When Wi-Fi was first developed and popularized in the late '90s, security was not a major concern. Unlike wired connections, anyone could simply connect to a Wi-Fi access point (AP) and steal bandwidth, or worse—sniff the traffic. The first a ...more
Welcome back, my novice hackers! In my series on cracking passwords, I began by showing off some basic password-cracking principles; developed an efficient password-cracking strategy; demonstrated how to use Hashcat, one of the most powerful password-cracking programs; and sh ...more
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Not too long ago, I showed how to find various online devices using Shodan. As you remember, Shodan is a different type of search engine. Instead of indexing the content of websites, it pulls the banner of web servers on all types of onlin ...more
Secure Shell is one of the most common network protocols, typically used to manage remote machines through an encrypted connection. However, SSH is prone to password brute-forcing. Key-based authentication is much more secure, and private keys can even be encrypted for additio ...more
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! Continuing with my series on how to crack passwords, I now want to introduce you to one of the newest and best designed password crackers out there—hashcat. The beauty of hashcat is in its design, which focuses on speed and versatility. It ...more
Password cracking is a specialty of some hackers, and it's often thought that raw computing power trumps everything else. That is true in some cases, but sometimes it's more about the wordlist. Making a custom, targeted wordlist can cut down cracking time considerably, and Wor ...more
A weak password is one that is short, common, or easy to guess. Equally bad are secure but reused passwords that have been lost by negligent third-party companies like Equifax and Yahoo. Today, we will use Airgeddon, a wireless auditing framework, to show how anyone can crack ...more
Beginners learning brute-forcing attacks against WPA handshakes are often let down by the limitations of default wordlists like RockYou based on stolen passwords. The science of brute-forcing goes beyond using these default lists, allowing us to be more efficient by making cus ...more
An internet connection has become a basic necessity in our modern lives. Wireless hotspots (commonly known as Wi-Fi) can be found everywhere! If you have a PC with a wireless network card, then you must have seen many networks around you. Sadly, most of these networks are sec ...more
People who know that I am a professional hacker often ask me what they can do to make their computers and personal information safe from people like me. The answer, of course, is that nothing will make you completely safe, but there are a number of measures any computer user c ...more
Greetings fellow hackers. This tutorial is about creating "safe" passwords. This is different from strong passwords. Safe passwords is just creating a password that is not used by someone else or colleague, my definition. But how do you prevent something like this from happeni ...more
Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all provide built-in features that allow you to save your username and password for your favorite sites, making the process for entering your credentials a breeze when you revisit them. While this automation does make your life a little easier, it ...more
While the security behind WEP networks was broken in 2005, modern tools have made cracking them incredibly simple. In densely populated areas, WEP networks can be found in surprising and important places to this day, and they can be cracked in a matter of minutes. We'll show y ...more