How I became a password cracker by Nate Anderson.
From the post:
At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn’t know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.
My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was approaching entry-level “script kiddie stuff.” This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking conceptually—I can’t hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I’m the very definition of a “script kiddie,” someone who needs the simplified and automated tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn’t manage if left to his own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once logged into port 25 of our school’s unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly placed to test that assertion.
It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and the resources of the Internet, successfully:
- Find a set of passwords to crack
- Find a password cracker
- Find a set of high-quality wordlists and
- Get them all running on commodity laptop hardware in order to
- Successfully crack at least one password
- In less than a day of work?
I could. And I walked away from the experiment with a visceral sense of password fragility. Watching your own password fall in less than a second is the sort of online security lesson everyone should learn at least once—and it provides a free education in how to build a better password.
Have Nate’s post on a USB stick along with some data and tools during summer travel.
If the kids get bored, put them to cracking passwords.
Think of it as the 21st century version of counting license plates on other cars.
I first saw this in a tweet by Mitch Kapor.