Cracking Passwords

One of the key components in performing a security assessment is the acquisition of user account information and cracking of the account password. There are many methods and tools that can be used to crack passwords, however, you must first retrieve the information to crack. And once again, there are many ways of acquiring the account information. This article will illustrate one method of acquiring user account information using a combination of social engineering and open source tools. We will then briefly go over a particular cracking method and tool.

Handing Over The Keys To The Kingdom

{mosgoogle}On one particular occasion, we were instructed by a client to do what ever it took, within legal means, to walk out of their building with the network user account information.

We were introduced to one of the Sr. Engineering staff as a consultant working on a new Anti-Virus solution. We asked the Engineer to show us around the server room and he happily did so. While we were talking, we asked him if he would mind if we ran a specialized virus checker on one of the Windows domain controllers, and he readily provided us with console access.

The disk we were using was labeled to look like it contained anti-virus tools. In reality, it contained a modified version of a program called "pwdump". The moment we ran the script, a bunch of information came up that indicated that their systems memory was clear of any known virus. What was really happening was all domain account information and the corresponding password hashes were being dumped to a file on the disk. We rapped up our tour and walked out of the building with everything we needed.