When a user enters their password, the computer computes the hash value and compares it to the stored hash value. If a hash can take data of any length or content, there are unlimited possibilities for data which can be hashed. Since a hash converts this text into a fixed length content for example, 32 characters , there are a finite number of combinations for a hash. It is a very very large number of possibilities, but not an infinite one.
Eventually two different sets of data will yield the same hash value. This is called a collision. If you have one hash and you're trying to go through every single possible plaintext value to find the plaintext which matches your hash, it will be a very long, very difficult process.
This is called the ' birthday problem ' in mathematics. The same type of analysis can be applied to hash functions in order to find any two hashes which match instead of a specific hash which matches the other. To avoid this, you can use longer hash functions such as SHA3, where the possibility of collisions is lower. You can try to brute force hashes, but it takes a very long time. The faster way to do that, is to use pre-computed rainbow tables which are similar to dictionary attacks.
The most important thing to remember about hacking is that no one wants to do more work than they have to do. For example, brute forcing hashes can be extremely time consuming and difficult. If there's an easier way to get your password, that's probably what a nefarious actor will try first. That means that enabling basic cyber security best practices is probably the easiest way to prevent getting hacked. In fact, Microsoft recently reported that just enabling 2FA will end up blocking Popular password cracking tools.
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Windows 11 Uninstall Clock. Teams Walkie-Talkie. PCI Express 6. Wordle Scams. These are software programs that are used to crack user passwords. We already looked at a similar tool in the above example on password strengths.
We will now look at some of the commonly used tools. John the Ripper uses the command prompt to crack passwords. This makes it suitable for advanced users who are comfortable working with commands. It uses to wordlist to crack passwords.
The program is free, but the word list has to be bought. It has free alternative word lists that you can use. It is used to recover passwords for user accounts, recovery of Microsoft Access passwords; networking sniffing, etc.
It is very common among newbies and script kiddies because of its simplicity of use. Ophcrack is a cross-platform Windows password cracker that uses rainbow tables to crack passwords. It also has a module for brute force attacks among other features. 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 dictionary attack in this example.
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