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.

How To Recover Lost Gmail Password With A SMS Message

The scary thing about Google and its umbrella of services is that it’s ’serviced’ by a single password. It’s too much of a hassle setting up unique accounts for each service. As a typical user, I use the same log-in for Blogger, AdSense, iGoogle et al. and of course Gmail. Unwittingly losing it could spell ruin on multiple fronts (After all I had carefully constructed it as je!!ybe@n$999 instead of using a memory friendly jellybeans).
Last month, Gmail added a small feature which gives us the utility of recovering our password via text message. Google’s initiative says that the problem is more widespread than we assume.

Here’s how it’s set up

1. You have to turn it on by logging into your Google Accounts. Under Personal Settings – Security: Click on Change password recovery options.
2. Google Accounts verifies your email again and you are forwarded to the Account Recovery Options page. For setting the new feature of text messaged code, all you need to do is to select the country from the dropdown and input the mobile number. Make sure that you don’t plan to change the number soon because it’s this number that will receive the password change code. Make sure all three password recovery options are setup. Click on save to update your account.

Here’s how it works

1. Suppose you can’t remember your password? Click on the Can’t access your account link just below the log-in box.
2. The Gmail Help page gives you the option of six possible scenarios. Select I forgot my password.
3. The above choice directs you to the password recovery page. It takes you through a CAPTCHA and finally to the Reset Password page.
4. The Reset Password page lists the three ways in which you can recover your password.
   • Using the secondary email address.
   • Using the SMS recovery code.
   • Or using the security question.
5. If you received the recovery code, follow that option and input the code in the form given.

Congratulations, you just brought back your account from limbo!
Google takes our goof-ups for granted and gives us another face-saver. But if the email account is something you swear by, rest assured that it is going to be a life saver.
In the past we have looked at Stefan’s 5 Free Password Generators for Nearly Unhackable Passwords. We have also appreciated How to Create Strong Passwords That You Can Remember Easily. Just a smidgen of attention while filling out the password recovery options (all three) will save us a lot of needless heartburn later.

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

Need to access your BIOS but don`t have the password?, use CmosPwd

CmosPwd can crack, backup and restore BIOS passwords, you can even kill/clear the Cmos if cmospwd can`t crack the bios. There are several ways of using Cmospwd but the one i found the most simple and straightforward was to simply create a DOS boot disk and run it from there since if you want to run cmospwd from windows you have to install a potentially dangerous driver.


Here`s a small tutorial:

1.- right click on the portable device that you want to use as a DOS boot disk, it can be a usb flash drive or a floppy disk but i had to use a floppy disk since my BIOS wasn`t configured to boot from an USB device.

2.- select the format option , then from the window that appears check the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" and click start.

3.- Download the cmospwd zip and extract it, then enter the new created folder and look for another folder called DOS, copy this folder to your newly created MS-DOS startup disk (I copied the whole cmospwd-5.0 folder but this should work too).

4.- Reboot your computer and pay extra attention as to what kind of BIOS you have, look for the BIOS word and the word right beside it, write the BIOS name and write it down since you will be needing that later.

5.- The DOS interface should start automatically from MS-Dos disk you have created.

6.- A prompt should appear , now simply type CD DOS and the prompt should change into something like A:\DOS: , then type cmospwd and the program should start.

7.- CmosPwd will show a long list of names, these are the different types of BIOS it can handle, locate your BIOS name on the list and write down the symbols that appear on the right side.

8.- Now once you are at the prompt again type cmospwd then / and finally the symbols that belonged to the name of your BIOS.

9.- Finally it will show the commands that it can do like backup,restore, Etc. however if you don`t wanna do all those things or find them too complicated just type cmospwd / K this will attempt to clear the BIOS erasing the password, however keep in mind that this will also erase all of the BIOS settings that are critical to the functioning of your computer so you will probably want to enter the BIOS and load the optimal values so that you can keep using your PC.



CmosPwd is a great program that just helped me in getting rid of my nagging BIOS password that i had been trying to bypass for years, i definitely recommend it. Available for Windows DOS/98/NT/W2K/XP/2003 and linux.



Works with the following BIOSes

• ACER/IBM BIOS
• AMI BIOS
• AMI WinBIOS 2.5
• Award 4.5x/4.6x/6.0
• Compaq (1992)
• Compaq (New version)
• IBM (PS/2, Activa, Thinkpad)
• Packard Bell
• Phoenix 1.00.09.AC0 (1994), a486 1.03, 1.04, 1.10 A03, 4.05 rev 1.02.943, 4.06 rev 1.13.1107
• Phoenix 4 release 6 (User)
• Gateway Solo - Phoenix 4.0 release 6
• Toshiba
• Zenith AMI

Get it at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/CmosPwd

Web Password Hashing

The Common Password Problem. Users tend to use a single password at many different web sites. By now there are several reported cases where attackers breaks into a low security site to retrieve thousands of username/password pairs and directly try them one by one at a high security e-commerce site such as eBay. As expected, this attack is remarkably effective.

A Simple Solution. PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user's password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF).

Phishing protection. A major benefit of PwdHash is that it provides a defense against password phishing scams. In a phishing scam, users are directed to a spoof web site where they are asked to enter their username and password. SpoofGuard is a browser extension that alerts the user when a phishing page is encountered. PwdHash complements SpoofGuard in defending users from phishng scams: using PwdHash the phisher only sees a hash of the password specific to the domain hosting the spoof page. This hash is useless at the site that the phisher intended to spoof.