Organizations of all sizes across all industries rely on encryption to protect their data. Passwords, personal identification information, and private messages all need to be hidden from nefarious parties. But the strongest encryption requirements come not from companies, but from the U.S. government. Whenever national security is involved, strong measures must be taken to ensure data is saved and transmitted in an uncrackable format. How can federal agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) protect their top secret information?
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AES 256 is virtually impenetrable using brute-force methods. While a 56-bit DES key can be cracked in less than a day, AES would take billions of years to break using current computing technology. Hackers would be foolish to even attempt this type of attack.
Nevertheless, no encryption system is entirely secure. Researchers who have probed AES have found a few potential ways in. In 2009, they discovered a possible related-key attack. This type of cryptanalysis attempts to crack a cipher by observing how it operates using different keys. Fortunately, the related-key attack is only a threat to AES systems that are incorrectly configured.
Microsoft Office files can be password-protected in order to prevent tampering and ensure data integrity. But password-protected documents from earlier versions of Office are susceptible to having their hashes extracted with a simple program called office2john. Those extracted hashes can then be cracked using John the Ripper and Hashcat.
John will start cracking, and depending on the password complexity, will finish when a match is found. Press almost any key to view the current status. When the hash is cracked, a message will be displayed on-screen with the document's password: Since our password was pretty simple, it only took seconds to crack it.
When it comes to password cracking of any kind, the best defense technique is to use password best practices. This means using unique passwords that are long and not easily guessable. It helps to utilize a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, although recent research has shown that simply using long phrases with high entropy is superior. Even better are long, randomly generated passwords which makes cracking them nearly impossible.
In regards to this specific attack, using Microsoft Office 2016 or 2019 documents or newer may not be effective, since office2john is designed to work on earlier versions of Office. However, as you can see above, Office 2016 may very well spit out a 2013 document without the user even knowing, so it doesn't mean a "new" file can't be cracked. Plus, there are still plenty of older Microsoft Office documents floating around out there, and some organizations continue to use these older versions, making this attack still very feasible today.
Today, we learned that password-protected Microsoft Office files are not quite as secure as one would be led to believe. We used a tool called office2john to extract the hash of a DOCX file, and then cracked that hash using John the Ripper and Hashcat. These types of files are still commonly used today, so if you come across one that has a password on it, rest easy knowing that there is a way to crack it.
Kerberoast generally targets user accounts with a SPN associated in Active Directory. This is because password for machine account is long and complex, it changes automatically every 30 days by default, which makes it hard to crack. On the contrary, user account password is set by human and tend to be less secure. In addition, the service ticket encryption level is determined by the value of an AD attribute msDS-SupportedEncryptionTypes during the TGS generation process, and this attribute has different default value set on machine account and user account.
Protected Users is a security group introduced in windows server 2012 R2 with additional protection against credential theft by not caching credentials in insecure ways. Basically, users added to this group cannot authenticate using NTLM, Digest, or CredSSP, cannot be delegated in Kerberos, cannot use DES or RC4 for Kerberos pre-authentication and the default TGT lifetime and renewal is reduced to 4 hours.
The most common and easiest to understand example of the brute force attack is the dictionary attack to crack passwords. In this, the attacker uses a password dictionary that contains millions of words that can be used as a password. The attacker tries these passwords one by one for authentication. If this dictionary contains the correct password, the attacker will succeed.
To prevent password cracking from brute force attacks, one should always use long and complex passwords. This makes it hard for attackers to guess the password, and brute force attacks will take too much time. Account lockout is another way to prevent the attacker from performing brute force attacks on web applications. However, for offline software, things are not as easy to secure.
Brute force is also used to crack the hash and guess a password from a given hash. In this, the hash is generated from random passwords and then this hash is matched with a target hash until the attacker finds the correct one. Therefore, the higher the type of encryption (64-bit, 128-bit or 256-bit encryption) used to encrypt the password, the longer it can take to break.
A reverse brute force attack is another term that is associated with password cracking. It takes a reverse approach in password cracking. In this, the attacker tries one password against multiple usernames. Imagine if you know a password but do not have any idea of the usernames. In this case, you can try the same password and guess the different usernames until you find the working combination.
Now, you know that a brute-forcing attack is mainly used for password cracking. You can use it in any software, any website or any protocol which does not block requests after a few invalid trials. In this post, I am going to add a few brute force password-cracking tools for different protocols.
I am sure you already know about the Aircrack-ng tool. This is a popular brute force wifi password cracking tool available for free. I also mentioned this tool in our older post on most popular password-cracking tools. This tool comes with WEP/WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tools to perform attacks on Wi-Fi 802.11. Aircrack-ng can be used for any NIC which supports raw monitoring mode.
It basically performs dictionary attacks against a wireless network to guess the password. As you already know, the success of the attack depends on the dictionary of passwords. The better and more effective the password dictionary is, the more likely it is that it will crack the password.
It is available for Windows and Linux platforms. It has also been ported to run on iOS and Android platforms. You can try it on given platforms to see how this tool can be used for brute force wifi password cracking.
John the Ripper is another awesome tool that does not need any introduction. It has been a favorite choice for performing brute force attacks for a long time. This free password-cracking software was initially developed for Unix systems. Later, developers released it for various other platforms. Now, it supports fifteen different platforms including Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS and OpenVMS.
This tool is very popular and combines various password-cracking features. It can automatically detect the type of hashing used in a password. Therefore, you can also run it against encrypted password storage.
Rainbow Crack is also a popular brute-forcing tool used for password cracking. It generates rainbow tables for using while performing the attack. In this way, it is different from other conventional brute-forcing tools. Rainbow tables are pre-computed. It helps in reducing the time in performing the attack.
L0phtCrack is known for its ability to crack Windows passwords. It uses dictionary attacks, brute force attacks, hybrid attacks and rainbow tables. The most notable features of L0phtcrack are scheduling, hash extraction from 64-bit Windows versions, multiprocessor algorithms and network monitoring and decoding. If you want to crack the password of a Windows system, you can try this tool.
In most cases, it can crack a Windows password in a few minutes. By default, Ophcrack comes with rainbow tables to crack passwords of less than 14 characters which contain only alphanumeric characters. Other rainbow tables are also available to download.
Hashcat claims to be the fastest CPU-based password cracking tool. It is free and comes for Linux, Windows and Mac OS platforms. Hashcat supports various hashing algorithms including LM Hashes, MD4, MD5, SHA-family, Unix Crypt formats, MySQL and Cisco PIX. It supports various attacks including brute force attacks, combinator attacks, dictionary attacks, fingerprint attacks, hybrid attacks, mask attacks, permutation attack, rule-based attacks, table-lookup attacks and toggle-case attacks.
Ncrack is also a popular password-cracking tool for cracking network authentications. It supports various protocols including RDP, SSH, HTTP(S), SMB, POP3(S), VNC, FTP and Telnet. It can perform different attacks including brute-forcing attacks. It supports various platforms including Linux, BSD, Windows and Mac OS X.
THC Hydra is known for its ability to crack passwords of network authentications by performing brute force attacks. It performs dictionary attacks against more than 30 protocols including Telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMB and more. It is available for various platforms including Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris 11, FreeBSD 8.1, OpenBSD, OSX and QNX/Blackberry.
These are a few popular brute-forcing tools for password cracking. There are various other tools are also available which perform brute force on different kinds of authentication. If I just give an example of a few small tools, you will see most of the PDF-cracking and ZIP-cracking tools use the same brute force methods to perform attacks and crack passwords. There are many such tools available for free or paid. 2ff7e9595c
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