You never want to be
on the wrong end of a password cracker. Your account will be compromised and a
hacker can use that information to steal your identity. Don't risk having your
password stolen: follow these techniques and download a data breach alert tool
that will notify you if your password is exposed.
What is password cracking?
Password cracking is
the act of discovering a user's password. Websites use encryption to store your
passwords so that third parties cannot figure out your real passwords. Hackers
and cybercriminals use password cracking methods to bypass encryption
protections, discover your passwords, and gain access to your personal
information.
Common password cracking techniques
Your password is
stored on a website's server as an encrypted string of characters called a
hash. Hackers cannot reverse hashing algorithms and figure out your password.
But there are many password cracking techniques they can use to get what they
want. They may even make you type your password on an unauthorized and
dangerous website.
Some types of password
attacks and other ways to crack passwords and circumvent encryption are
becoming more sophisticated and diversified. Here are some of the top password
cracking methods and how you can protect yourself from them.
Guess passwords
Passwords should be
hard to crack but easy to remember. Unfortunately, people underestimate the
risks and are too inclined to make their passwords hard to forget. It is often
easy to access information simply by guessing that the password is, in fact,
"password."
Other common passwords
are birthdays and hobbies, which make your password easy to guess. When setting
your passwords, don't use terms that can be easily guessed or found on the
Internet. Instead, use long, hard-to-guess passwords or passphrases that
combine several random words.
How can you create a
strong password that you won't forget? Memorizing your password or writing it
down can be risky. This is why you should use a password manager, which is a
much more secure way to store your passwords.
Brute force attack
Brute force methods
try every imaginable character combination. Brute force password crackers
convert millions of possible passwords into hashes and compare those hashes
with the one associated with your password.
This method is
time-consuming: the more complex the password, the longer it takes to crack it.
It would take a powerful computer hundreds or even thousands of years to crack
a sufficiently complex password. Although some of these attacks use the power
of botnets, the correct password can evade a brute force attack.
Brute force hacking
can also take advantage of credential recycling, which is the use of previous
cracked username and password combinations. Similarly, reverse brute force
attacks start with a common password (such as "password") and snoop
on usernames instead.
As the range of
password cracking methods has become more sophisticated, using data breach
monitoring software has become more important.
Dictionary attack
Dictionary attacks
involve a huge table of relatively common passwords and their hashes. For
example, a dictionary attack tool could compare an encrypted hash found on
Facebook's server with one from its database. And it is quite possible that you
will find a match.
These sample passwords
contain phrases or dictionary words along with slight variations. Thus, a
password that adds or omits a character or with a random number in the middle
of the password could still be exposed.
If you're wondering
how a list with hundreds of millions of possible passwords can exist, the
answer is that a text file containing that much text is still only a few
gigabytes and can be easily downloaded.
The dictionary attack
list also functions as a database of previously cracked passwords, putting
those who reuse their passwords multiple times at greater risk. Dictionary
attacks highlight the importance of always using unique passwords.
Social engineering
Rainbow table attacks
eliminate the need to store hundreds of millions of password combinations.
Rainbow tables remember parts of hashes before trying to locate the entire
string, which reduces bulk and makes any password-hash combination much easier
to find.
Whereas brute force
attacks take a long time and dictionary attacks take up a lot of space (because
you have to sort massive files), rainbow table attacks make certain trade-offs
and reduce the amount of time and space needed. This has proven to be very
effective, especially with the popular RainbowCrack tool.
Mask
attack
Mask attacks assume
that a password assumes a common form, such as using one uppercase letter at
the beginning followed by several lowercase letters, instead of going through
all possible iterations. This allows mask attacks to crack passwords in a matter
of minutes, instead of the years that brute force cracking could take.
"Spidering"
Spidering is the
process of combing through a company's internal or external communications to
find phrases or slang that employees can use as passwords. Like individual passwords,
company passwords often reflect the daily activities of those who use them. The
more training documents and promotional materials a company has, the more
likely it is that their passwords can be cracked.
Offline hack
Offline hacking occurs
when a hacker obtains a set of hashed passwords from a compromised server and
then compares a plaintext password with the offline hash. The website won't
know something is going on, and the hacker has plenty of time to crack the
password.
Password cracking tools
Network sniffers and
packet capture tools are two types of password cracking tools that monitor and
intercept data packets. These tools require a network connection, but once
established, the bits of data going in and out can be converted to plain text.
Fortunately, these same tools can also help a company discover security flaws.
Password crackers
Many of the most
popular password crackers use a combination of the above techniques. Its ease
of use, combined with the growing consumer demand for high-powered computers,
has more and more people turning to hacking.
Protect yourself
against password cracking, which monitors the latest data breaches and alerts
you immediately if one of your passwords has been breached. So you can quickly
change your passwords before someone else can use them to compromise your
accounts.
Malware
Malware is another
password cracking tool. Specifically, keyloggers are a type of malware that
secretly records all your keystrokes and sends them to whoever put the
keylogger on the system.
Be sure to use the
best antivirus software you can find to defend against keyloggers and other
malware. Installing a powerful anti malware tool will keep password hacking
software away from your device.
Brutus
Brutus is a
brute-force password cracker that uses a comprehensive, dictionary-based attack
method that allows endless testing. In addition to its popularity with
cybercriminals, Brutus also has legitimate uses, such as when someone doesn't
know their own router's password.
Rainbowcrack
RainbowCrack helps
hackers crack passwords by generating rainbow tables, those precomputed sets of
hashes that speed up the password cracking process. Fortunately, the use of
rainbow tables can be thwarted by a common technique known as salting, a
process whereby web hosts insert random text strings into plaintext passwords
before hashing them in the database. .
Cain and Abel
Cain and Abel extracts all the
passwords found on a PC. Unless you do a thorough wipe of all system files, a
Windows 10 password cracker like Cain and Abel can unearth passwords for email
addresses, operating systems, Wi-Fi connections, and much more.
Medusa
Medusa works by
matching passwords against a list of words, and can even be used to extract the
passwords of other machines on the same Wi-Fi network. Medusa requires some
technical knowledge to work, but it's easy to come up with instructions to use
it.
The proliferation of
tools like the Medusa password cracker means it's more important than ever to
use long, unique, and hard-to-guess passwords or passphrases.