Technology Education Blog

In this practical scenario, we are going to crack Windows account with a simple password. Windows uses NTLM hashes to encrypt passwords. We will use the NTLM cracker tool in Cain and Abel to do that.

Cain and Abel cracker can be used to crack passwords using;

Dictionary attack

Brute force

Cryptanalysis

We will use the dictionary attack in this example. You will need to download the dictionary attack wordlist here 10k-Most-Common.zip

For this demonstration, we have created an account called Accounts with the password qwerty on Windows 7.

Password cracking steps

Open Cain and Abel, you will get the following main screen

The local user accounts will be displayed as follows. Note the results shown will be of the user accounts on your local machine.

Note: the time taken to crack the password depends on the password strength, complexity and processing power of your machine.

If the password is not cracked using a dictionary attack, you can try brute force or cryptanalysis attacks.

Summary

Password cracking is the art of recovering stored or transmitted passwords.

Password strength is determined by the length, complexity, and unpredictability of a password value.

Common password techniques include dictionary attacks, brute force, rainbow tables, spidering and cracking.

Password cracking tools simplify the process of cracking passwords.