Ophcrack – A Password Hack Tool to Crack Almost Any Windows Password

There are a lot of different reasons why one would want to use any number of password hack tools to hack a Windows password. Of course, there are the good-hearted reasons, like helping your grandpa because he forgot his password and is locked out of his own computer. Then, there are the more dubious reasons, like spying on your accountant.
In the past, MakeUseOf has published other password-cracking related articles. Those who are interest should check out T.J. Miniday’s 3 Ways to Reset Forgotten Windows Administrator Password.
However, there might be circumstances in which you’d need unnoticed access – being able to use the terminal without literally changing the password.

Ophcrack

That’s where Ophcrack comes in. Ophcrack is one of the more effective password hack tools that runs via Windows, Mac and Linux installations or on a Live CD, and it can be used to crack almost any Windows password.

To manage this, Ophcrack uses rainbow tables to guess the password. When a working one is encountered, it is presented to you, and you can simply log in with it. One would think this “guessing” takes a lot of time, but that’s just where the power of rainbow tables lies.

Rainbow Tables in a Nutshell

Operation systems don’t store the user passwords in plain text — that’d be highly insecure, and even right out stupid. Instead, they calculate the hashes of the passwords by putting the passwords through a one-way hash function and store those. When one would obtain these hashes, they would still be rather useless; the password needs to be entered, after which the hash needs to be calculated and compared to the stored password hash.

e.g. ‘makeuseof.com’ would become ‘9fb883363640e11970be10a5936a37fc:b35f6f8268073d2242e0cd8b72554d8a’ when converted to Windows XP’s LM hash.

A rainbow table is basically an enormous list of passwords — basically every password a brute force attack would try — with their respective hashes included. Although this table takes a lot of time to generate, it can reduce the cracking of passwords to minutes, or even seconds.

Downloadable Tables

Ophcrack supplies a few of these rainbow tables, free, for your use. They’re included in the Live CD, can automatically be retrieved from the Windows executable, or downloaded from the Ophcrack website. We’ll quickly look over the available tables, and their possibilities.
For Windows XP, Ophcrack supplies two alphanumeric tables. With these, you can crack 99.99% of all passwords under 14 characters, consisting of a combination between letters and numbers — abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789. Because the LM hash used by Windows XP is insensitive to capitalization, these hash tables contain 80 billion different hashes, corresponding with 12 septillion possible passwords.

You can choose between the XP free small and the XP free fast tables. These can both be used to crack the same passwords, but because the XP free fast table is twice as large, you can crack them in half the time.
The downside of both tables is their unability to crack passwords with special characters — these can only be cracked using the premium XP special tables.
For Windows Vista, which abandoned the weak LM hash, and moved on to the stronger NT hash, there are less possibilities. Currently, Ophcrack only gives away a table with dictionary-words and variations (hybrids) for free. If you’re willing to cough up a lot of money (about 99$), they also provide alphanumerical tables – including special characters.

Because the NT hash is subjective to capitalization, and allows a much greater password length (whereas the LM hash simply splits large sequences up in multitudes of smaller strings), these premium rainbow tables can range in size from 8GB to over 130GB.
And that’s the essence of it. There’s some more technical information (a real how-to) in the Ophcrack help files (included in the downloads).
If you’re shivering in your boots after reading this article and thinking,”Gosh, everyone’s going to know how to hack my password. What shall I do?” Then it may be a good time to create a stronger password. Stefan wrote about 5 free password generators that will help you make nearly unhackable passwords, no matter what password hack tools a hacker tries to use. It’s a good start.
So, what do you think? Is Ophcrack really the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or hardly worth one’s attention? — Let us know your experiences, opinions and questions in the comments section below.

GPG GUI - Password Protect Any File

GPG GUI has the sole purpose of password protecting individual files so that they can be opened at a later time.

GPG GUI is a front end for the symmetric passphrase feature of GnuPG. This means that any file, of any size, may be encrypted and protected with a password so that no other user can read the contents of the file. Folders cannot be encrypted or decrypted.
Basic usage for this application would be to get a copy of the file you want to protect, and then opening it with GPG GUI. Once the file is selected, the text entry area would be the place to specify a password the file will be encrypted with. Blank passwords will not work. Selecting "Encrypt" will start the short process that may take time depending on the size of the file. Once the process ends, the directory that the original file is in will have a duplicate protected copy, with the extention .gpg at the end.
I would highly recommend that you check that the protected file will be decrypted by renaming the original and trying out the decrypt action. This will verify that you entered the password correctly. If you delete the original and the password does not work on the encrypted version, you will NOT be able to restore it.
After you have encrypted the file, delete the original if you wish and store the file in a safe place. If you want to share the file with others, you may tell them the password so that they can decrypt the file using GPG GUI or GnuPG.

 

Download

Kakasoft`s File encryption provides a quick but light way of encrypting your files

Overview:

Kakasoft`s file encryption is a very simple but efective file encryption utility

Review:

Kakasoft`s file encryption makes some promises that it doesn`t keep, for example it claims that it has:

1. Four encryption algorithms Blowfish, AES, MD5, Triple-DES.
2. Strong key support, handling and cryptographic implementations.
3. Encrypts megabytes of file data per second on modern machines.

the first i dunno if its true because when you encrypt stuff it doesn`t give you any option to select the encryption algorithm!, the second claim also can`t be verified without knowing the type of encryption and the third claim is the one i am willing to to concede its true because it encrypted stuff fast. So why i am posting this program if some of the stuff it claims can`t be verified?, well its because it works in a very basic but effective way. When you start the program you will see the interface of the picture i have uploaded into my post, click in "Add files" to add one or several files and type a password, if you select 2 or more files to be encrypted at the same time each one will have the same password which is a bad idea from a security standpoint, anyway after inputting a password click "Encrypt" and the selected files will have their extension changed into .encrypt and will have a new icon and also can only be decrypted by launching the file and inputting the correct password however the filename and the original extension will be visible to anyone , that is a problem if your filename is something like BIGBOOBIESANDASSES.AVI so you better rename the file you want to encrypt beforehand to something less conspicuous. Now after the file has been encrypted even if you change the extension to what it was originally and open it you will only get a message that the file has been corrupted. Kakasoft`s file encryption will probably stand low level users from getting into your files (read: your mom) but i dunno if it will stand high level users (Read: The feds) i wish i was an advanced computer technician in order to confirm this.
In conclusion Kakasoft`s file encryption is probably a good encryption utility but i wouldn`t recommend it for keeping your credit card info secret, it is better suited in my judgement to keep your porno videos secure from your mom,dad, or little brother`s prying hands. Available for all versions of Windows.


Get it at http://www.kakasoft.com/freeware.htm