What is Password Cracking?

Password Cracking is a technique used to gain access starting from personal information and applies to organizational security. As with the ongoing advancement of technology data protection and management are very important and have a vital role in the prevention of cyber fraud and hacking.

Creation and management of unique and strong passwords are the ways to enforce data security and as well as periodically make necessary updates. However, hackers or cybercriminals can steal and get access to personal and sensitive data by employing the password cracking technique also for individuals and businesses.

What Does Password Cracking Mean?

Password cracking is the process of attempting to find the password by trying many possible combinations. It's guessing attacks, rainbow attacks, and dictionary attacks. One of the techniques hackers use to gain access to sensitive data, financial information, or a person's account.

Password cracking is unauthorized access to data that should be confidentially kept to a computer system, online account, or any personal account by way of decrypting the passwords.

What Does a Password Cracking Attack Look Like?

Essentially, a password-cracking attack is an attack that involves gaining unauthorized access to a secured system or data source by attempting to decipher the passwords or guess them. Such forms of attacks can be carried out in the scenarios listed below:

1. Online Attacks: An attacker attempts to log in at the closet interface via guessed passwords. This can be the use of common passwords, character combinations, or an automated tool that can be checked out on a fast scale. Online attacks will trigger the security mechanism, and this might include account lockout or CAPTCHA, among other failed enabled actions.
2. Offline Attacks: Basically, in an offline attack, a hacker gains access to a hashed or encrypted password file and then tries to crack the passwords either by reversing the process of hashing or through the use of different possible passwords until they get a match. This mostly makes an offline attack more dangerous because it can allow unlimited attempts without any detection.
3. Social Engineering Attacks: These are processes of getting a user's password in various ways that are not very straightforward. The method might be via phishing emails, phony websites, or other means of direct manipulation. After that, this can be used to log in and gain unauthorized access.

What Are Password Cracking Techniques?

1. Password Cracking

Password cracking is the process of identifying a password or passphrase by different combinations of characters and trying to crack the same till the desired one found and gain unauthorized access.

This method is mainly used to get access to confidential personal and touchy information.

2. Brute Force Attack

A brute force attack is one of the methods hackers and cyber-criminals use in deciphering a password, wherein a trial-and-error method involves trying combinations of characters until the desired password is deciphered.

3. Dictionary Attack

The dictionary attack uses ordinary words or phrases that are frequently used to try and identify or decipher the password.

This technique turns out to be more beneficial, unlike brute force attack as it can reduce the number of combination that is to be tried to decipher.

4. Rainbow Table Attack

A rainbow table attack is one which makes use of a precomputed table for password cracking.

It holds a substantial quantity of password hash and their corresponding plain text passwords for using to reverse-engineer hashed passwords and to gain unauthorized access.

5. Phishing

Phishing is a form of social engineering by which users are manipulated into giving away such sensitive and touchy information, typically passwords or other sensitive information unknowingly.

Compromised websites or emails are one of the most common tricks played to gather credentials and to inflict unauthorized access on the victim.

How Password Cracking Works?

Password cracking is done by hackers and uses specialized software and tools to make the process faster more efficient and automated without the explicit knowledge of the users. However several techniques are followed and may be utilized by the attackers to crack passwords such as dictionary attacks, brute-force attacks, rainbow table attacks, and so on.

• Dictionary attacks are designed to crack passwords, whereby the hacker uses a list of commonly used passwords or words from a dictionary as possible passwords. He then feeds the list into some software that will systematically try every word in the list against the account targeted until it gets the right password. This method comes in very handy against weak passwords that are easily guessable, such as "password123" or "admin."

• Brute-force attacks are useful in cracking long and complex passwords that demand high computational power. In other words, cracking consumes quite a long time until the correct password is found.

• An attacker would use all possible character combinations starting with the single, then to two characters, and keep trying till the password is deciphered. With the advancement of technology and high computation pics, attackers can efficiently run brute-force attacks that can crack passwords within a reasonable amount of time.

• For example, consider the case of a simple password, "local123." A few of the combinations are local1, olcal1, cloal1, lcoal1, oclal1, colal1, aolcl1, oalcl1, laocl1, alocl1, olacl1, loacl1, lcaol1, claol1, alcol1, etc.

• Rainbow table attacks are the very sophisticated approaches that include a precomputed table with a large set of password hashes, mapping to their corresponding plaintext passwords.

When a hacker obtains a password hash from a system, will look it up in the rainbow table to quickly determine the plaintext password associated with that hash and is very effective against systems that store passwords in a hashed format without salting.

For example, let us assume a website that stores user passwords as hashed values in its database. An attacker who got access to the hashed passwords can use a rainbow table to look up the hashes and retrieve the plaintext passwords for gaining unauthorized access to user accounts.

What Are Password Cracking Tools?

There are several tools available for password cracking, which include:

1. John the Ripper: A very popular open source password cracker, supporting a wide array of password hashes. Quite commonly used during penetration testing and research.
2. Hashcat: The name says it all—hash plus cat equals hashcat. It's extremely fast, hence hugely versatile, and thus ranks this as one of the most used password crackers available out there. It currently supports over 200 hashing algorithms. It can do brute force, dictionary, and hybrid attacks.
3. Hydra: Fast Network logon cracker which supports many different protocols as well as services. Hydra is a parallelized login cracker that helps attack various online services, including SSH, FTP, and HTTP.
4. Cain and Abel: It is a Windows-based password recovery tool. Cain and Abel could sniff the network before cracking the encrypted passwords using brute-force, dictionary, and cryptanalysis attacks.
5. AirCrack-ng: This is a suite of tools designed for cracking Wi-Fi passwords. It supports PTW, FMS, and other algorithms to crack WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK keys.

Strategies For Prevention of Password Cracking

Setting up strong and unique passwords

Strong and unique password creation is one of the best ways to prevent password cracking and some points must be kept in mind while creating passwords like long, complex, and a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters are must.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides secured authentication and access by asking users to give two or more forms of verification before getting into the system hence password cracker faces difficulty and makes it more challenging to get unauthorized access.

Password updating

Password updating is very much appreciated and recommended to reduce the risk of password hacking and unauthorized access.

For Creating a Strong Password: What to Avoid?

To avoid the attempts of the password cracking and increasing the security development of solid passwords is a matter of much importance if looked deeply into. Common simple techniques are being discussed,

1. Common words should be avoided as password

Like 'password', 'place name' or '1234' and so on. Words that can be guessed easily are never used.

2. Repeating/Sequential strings for the password

We must never use serial characters like 'bbbb1113344' or 'a' or '1234', since it is very easy to decrypt.

3. Do not use steer-clear Personal data

We must never use birth date or address or family member names as a password since it is very easy to decrypt for personal data.

4. Waiving short and simple passphrases in creating a password

Long and intricate passwords with a mix of characters, letters, and numbers are very difficult to crack and should ideally be more than 12 characters long for maximum security on the web.

5. Do not reuse passwords.

One password for multiple accounts is a bad idea because if one account is hacked, all the accounts will be affected and they will all turn out to be vulnerable. It is important to use unique passwords for every account to hold it secure and safe.

Is Password Cracking Illegal?

On its own, password cracking is not illegal, since it is only the context and the intent which make all the difference:

• Legal Use: Password cracking can legally take place, for example, in situations of penetration testing, security audits, or recovery of lost passwords, provided explicit permission from the owner has been obtained by the person doing it to the system or data. What will mostly be aimed at is the detection and reduction of security weakness.

• Illegal Use: Password cracking, if carried out without authorization and with the purpose to gain unauthorized access to systems, data, or accounts, is considered illegal. This may involve breaking into another person's account or obtaining their personal data and bypassing security countermeasures. In many nations, the unauthorized cracking of passwords is a criminal offense and may be punishable under severe penalties, including fines and imprisonment.

Conclusion

It is the art used to gain entry starting from personal information. With the advent of technology, the applicability for organizational security as well has become a potential threat and a key concern. Hence, one needs to be aware of how password-cracking techniques are followed by cybercriminals and how to maintain safety measures in this regard.

Strong and secured passwords, frequent updating of the same, and its effective management could be some of the preventive steps that may help reduce the risk involved for the individual and the business. On the other hand, MFA techniques along with strong passwords can bring strong security and protect personal and confidential information from the evolving digital and technological advancements.