What are the most popular password cracking tools?
Overview:
Password cracking is an exceptional cycle of speculating an enciphered word which a programmer attempts to get from the central database. Cracking passwords is not everyone’s cup of tea, but with the right tools and techniques, try to find out details about it and anyone can learn to do it.
Following are the top six password cracking tools:
- Brutus
- RainbowCrack
- Wfuzz
- John the Ripper
- OphCrack
- Aircrack-NG
Brutus:
Initially composed to help check routers for default and regular passwords, released in October 2000, free of cost and a fast-paced password cracking tool in cryptology.
Brutus is a widely used tool to break Windows login passwords and many more. It supports HTTP for Basic Authentication, Pop3, Telnet, HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), FTP, SMB, and other forms like NetBus, IMAP, NNTP, and others.
With Brutus, it is possible to establish your authentication methods. This program enables multi-stage authentication engines and can bind to 60 targets at the same time.
Resume and Load are two great highlights. These features allow you to pause the attack process at any time and restart it anytime you want.
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RainbowCrack:
It belongs to the Hash Cracker tool group, which uses a large-scale time-memory trade-off mechanism to crack passwords quicker than standard brute force methods.
The time and memory trade-off is a computing machine in which all plain text and hash pairs are computed using a specific hash algorithm. The rainbow table is then used to store the data. This procedure will take a long time. However, when the table is set up, it can break passwords even better than brute-force methods.
Making a rainbow table is not needed. Rainbow tables (LM), MD 5 rainbow tables, rainbow tables (NTLM), and one rainbow table have all been successfully created by RainbowCrack’s creators.
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Wfuzz:
Wfuzz is a password-cracking web program that uses brute force to break passwords. It can also be used to locate tools such as servlets, archives, and secret scripts. This tool can also detect various types of injections in Web applications, such as LDAP Injection, SQL Injection, XSS Injection, and so on.
Wizz is a command-line utility that comes pre-installed with Kali Linux. Using the fuzzing technique, which is used to find basic bugs in web applications. Fuzzing is the process of testing a web application with a large number of identified insecure inputs to see whether any of them break the web application.
It’s a fantastic tool for easily checking for basic bugs in an application. It’s also useful for checking recently identified bugs to guarantee that the programme doesn’t have any regressions.
Wfuzz’s most notable features include:
- HTML output with colour.
- Multi-Threading.
- Multiple Proxy Support.
- SOCK and Proxy Support.
- The power to inject through various dictionaries and multiple stages.
- GET and POST Brute Forcing.
- The time delay between two requests.
- Headers, post, and authenticated data brute-forcing.
- Fuzzing of cookies.
John the Ripper:
Another common free open source tool for password cracking in Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix is John the Ripper. It is a password-cracking utility for UNIX-based systems that was first published in 1996. It was created with the purpose of testing password power, brute-forcing encrypted (hashed) passwords, and cracking passwords using dictionary attacks. A Windows edition is also available.
This programme detects passwords that are too easy to guess. There is also a pro-version of this tool, which has more options and native packages for testing target operating systems.
Password crackers and crypt-analysis software generally operate in one of three ways.
- Dictionary Attack
- Brute-Force Attack
- Rainbow tables
In addition to an external mode, JTR has at least three modes, allowing a user to specify a personalized mode via a configuration file. These are:
- Single crack mode
- Wordlist mode
- Incremental mode
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OphCrack:
OphCrack is another free rainbow-table-based password cracking app for Windows 7, Vista, and XP. It’s a common password cracking tool for Windows that can also be used on Linux and Mac. It is capable of cracking all LM and NTLM hashes. Since it employs rainbow tables, Ophcrack is a lightning-fast password cracker.
It loads the pre-fed megabytes of hashes and compares the Windows login hash to its massive archive, then shows the password in plain text when it detects a match. Testing a known password against OphCrack and getting the best of the rainbow tables will help confirm that it is extremely safe.
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Aircrack-NG:
Aircrack-ng is a comprehensive collection of methods for evaluating the security of WiFi networks. To use it effectively, you must first grab any packets, which must be collected using the wireless network card. AirCrack-ng supports common wireless cards based on the Atheros, Hermes, and Prism chipsets.
Aircrack-NG was created with Linux in mind, but its capabilities have, since then, expanded to include Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and eComStation 2. It will break WEP and WPA-PSK keys by inserting enough frames into wireless traffic.
Conclusion: There are various tools available for password cracking. But, all tools are not equally efficient. Some can do better over the other, based on the situation.
