Ethical Hacking

If you have completed a dictionary attack, but some passwords still have not been recovered, you have to follow up with a Mask attack. In this attack, the program tries to guess the password by trying every single combination of characters until the password is found. Mask attack is similar to a brute-force attack, but with rules to reduce the number of errant entries. The brute force attack is the slowest method of password attack, but can often be successful on short and simple passwords. Mask attacks against password hashes are effective if you know the exact length or certain characters from the password string & this type of attack can be done more efficiently by using precomputed mask file that comes forth with the hashcat package. Implementation of the mask is reasonable because of it brute force all the impaired characters that craved to finalize the password string. What excites more is it takes no less than a minute to uncover the password. However, this does not ob

Hacking is the act of finding the possible entry points that exist in a computer system or a computer network and finally entering into them. Hacking is usually done to gain unauthorized access to a computer system or a computer network, either to harm the systems or to steal sensitive information available on the computer. Finding out a password is the usually the first step in hacking and breaking into systems, that's why there are so many articles telling you to change your passwords often and make them hard to figure out and part of practising proper password security is not leaving your password in plain sight. This shoulder surfing password-stealing technique gathers information from a computer. As the name implies, a hacker will simply look over your shoulder as you enter in passwords and other sensitive information. Shoulder surfing is more common with ATMs, credit card machines, and any other device that requires the input of a PIN. According to Hacker’s point of view

Think your passwords are secure? Think again.😉 When you finally get a useful PDF report from the Internet, only to find out that you cannot copy, edit, or even print it, how do you solve the problem? This is where a PDF Password Hacking comes from. In this post, I will provide the easiest solution to hack PDF password with Hashcat & John the ripper Jumbo. After you have hacked PDF password, you might like to edit the PDF files: copy content from PDF, edit the PDF text, images, links directly. You still need this all-in-one PDF Editor - Qpdf, developed by Jay Berkenbilt. It helps you modify PDF contents, perform transformations such as linearization, encryption, and decryption of PDF files etc. It's easy to imagine that passwords are safe when the systems they protect lockout users after three or four wrong guesses, blocking automated guessing applications. Well, that would be true if it were not for the fact that most password hacking takes place offline, using a

The most popular low-tech method for gathering passwords is social engineering. Social engineering takes advantage of the trusting nature of human beings to gain information that later can be used maliciously. A common social engineering technique is simply to con people into divulging their passwords. It sounds ridiculous, but it happens all the time. Phishing has long been associated with cybercrimes that use deception-particularly, social engineering – to dupe victims into disclosing personal or financial account data. Once disclosed, these data are then used to perpetrate (financial) fraud. In the past, the deception part of a phishing attack has commonly been delivered via unsolicited email, spam. Attackers first sent spam to thousands and later millions of recipients with confidence that some recipients would fall victim to the deception, click on a URL embedded in the email, visit an impersonation web site, and unwittingly disclose credit, personal or sensitive data (e.g., use

Want to get started with password cracking and not sure where to begin? In this post, we’ll explore how to get started with it. Most systems don’t store passwords on them. Instead, they store hashes of passwords and when authentication takes place, the password is hashed and if the hashes match authentication is successful. Password hashes can be stored in different ways depending on the encryption used. Hash cracking usually consists of taking a wordlist, hashing each word and comparing it against the hash you’re trying to crack. This is a variation of a dictionary attack because wordlists often are composed of not just dictionary words but also passwords from public password dumps. This type of cracking becomes difficult when hashes are salted. A hash function is a ONE WAY FUNCTION (You cannot turn the transformed input back to the way it was) which transforms a string of character into a fixed-length series of characters and numbers. Salt is a SERIES OF RANDOM CHARACTERS whic

How a password creates more security problem than it solves? An authentication mechanism (or method) is a way for you to prove that you’re allowed to access something. Passwords have been the default method of authentication for as long as most of us have needed to prove to a computer that we’re allowed to access it. However, passwords are not the only authentication mechanism. In the early days of computers and mainframes, passwords were stored in a database as plain text. When you wanted to sign-in, a gatekeeper application would ask you for your password. It would take whatever you typed in and check if it was equal to whatever it had stored in the database and if true, you were granted access. As the Internet evolved and grew, malicious hackers started gaining unauthorized access to systems. Once they were in, they would immediately download the plain-text password database and have instant access to all users passwords. Developers and systems administrators needed to come up w