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Friday, March 4, 2011

Password Cracking


What is Password Cracking?

Password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system.The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password , to gain unauthorized access to a system, or as a preventive measure by system administrators to check for easily crackable passwords.

What are the Common Methods?

1. Guessing

Easy Passwords can be sometimes guessed by people. These include most common passwords like The persons name, D.O.B, QWERTY, 123456, etc.

2. Bruteforcing

Many password cracker use this method to crack passwords. This method involves a software repeatedly trying out different combinations for logging into the system (or account).

3. Dictionary Attack

A dictionary attack is the simplest and quickest type of attack. It’s used to identify a password that is an actual word, which can be found in a dictionary. Most commonly,
the attack uses a dictionary file of possible words.

4. Social Engineering

This method involves interaction with the slave (or so told yet to be slave). In this method the Hacker asks the person many questions casually in a mindset to make him blurt out his password or atleast give a clue of it.


Suggestions to Prevent your password from getting cracked:

    * Using Alphabets , Numerals , Symbols in your passwords.
    * Encrypting your passwords with Hashes like MD5.
    * Installing a Captcha to stop bots.

These are a just few common methods.

Tools Required to Crack Passwords

Password Cracking Softwares:

Ultimate Password List (Dictionary)

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