Tools And Techniques In Cracking A Password

The cracking or hacking of a password carry some ominous meaning as one readily associates it to illegal or unauthorized hacking to gain an unauthorized access to a database that may hold much valuable information to the owner. There are, however, occasions when cracking a password has to be legitimately done for the benefit of the user or owner. This happens when the user accidentally forgets or misplaces the password for one reason or another. For fear that the system may be attacked by illegal hackers users are advised to make their passwords strong, long and hard to crack. That means it is also hard to remember even by the user.

The Techniques in Password Hacking

There are several ways by which a password can be cracked. This means that most hard to remember passwords can be easy to guess with these techniques. There are, however, instances when the hard to remember password serves its purpose. The real goal is to generate easy to remember, but hard to guess passwords.

Cracking a password is doable with the use of certain techniques. Some of these are: Dictionary attack or the use of common words; Brute force attack that is akin to Dictionary attack but with the bonus of detecting alpha-numeric figures from aaa1 to zzz10; and Rainbow table attack that uses pre-computed hashes. Other techniques include phishing, social engineering, Malware, Shoulder surfing, spidering, offline cracking and guessing.

Password Recovery Tools

Hacking passwords sure sounds easy; but not so without the aid of password recovery tools. To make cracking of password possible without losing one’s sanity, password crackers are important in order to recover or reset lost administrator and user passwords. While cracking the passwords in your own computer or company is a legal practice, this is unlawful if done without any authorization from the owner of the account or system.

The use of these tools is based on the concept of password cracking to recover the passwords that were accidentally misplaced or forgotten. If there is a password manager or generator that also securely store the passwords for all the accounts that you or your company have, you do not need to crack the passwords anymore not unless you also forgot the password of the password manager. This is the advantage of a password manager; without it, cracking can take seconds to years. The amount of time that is required to crack a password is influenced by factors such as: strength of password, algorithm used, familiarity with the properties of the password recovery system, and the proficiency or skill of the person running the cracking tool.

Password Cracking Tools

If you find cracking of passwords important, there are tools that you can use that can effectively converts manual into semi-automated task. Some of the widely used tools are John the Ripper, Cain and Abel, Aircrack, L0phtcrack, THC Hydra, SolarWinds, AirSnort, RainbowCrack, Brutus, and Pwdump. You can also try the ones made by ElcomSoft, LCPSoft and Lastbit. There are still others that are coming out from time to time from other companies that dedicate effort in building password retrieval/extracting tools.

Every computer literate person in this generation has heard about cracking or hacking of passwords. This interests many because it is like opening a portal of immense information; some of which can be very critical especially when it pertains to financial aspects and trade secrets of businesses. This is why passwords need to be well guarded or kept secured.

But of course, the security of a database is only partly protected by a password. Cracking a password is just one way of exposing your account. There are other security countermeasures that must be built around mission-critical assets to protect it.