After your lab experience with password hashes, let’s look at the Cisco, Windows, and Linux password hashes in the list below.
What is a password hash?
RedHat and Cisco passwords are salted while Windows passwords are not. What does that mean?
What are some software tools that can be used to crack password hashes?
Are there any websites that can be used to crack passwords?
If you can crack any of the passwords, post your findings.
Again, this is not intended to be an extensive assignment. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time to answer the questions.
Finally, what do you feel are some best practices to avoid having your own personal passwords cracked?
Note: If a word is listed before the hash, that is the username being provided.
Password hashing is a process that takes the passwords series of characters and runs them through an algorithm that produces another unique set of characters that is difficult or impossible to reverse engineer. The idea is that no one has to store any passwords because if they see that the hash matches up, they know that you know the password. Salting a password means that you add characters to the password prior to running it through the algorithm.
Kali Linux comes standard with a number of password hashing tools, like John the Ripper and Hashcat (Casrson, 2020). There are quite a few applications out there that hash passwords using varying different methods.
The first thing to do to avoid having your password cracked is to make sure you have a sufficiently complex password. Just because a password is long, that does not necessarily mean that it is complex. Another practice would be to change your passwords periodically.
Sources:
Carson, J. (2020, April 28). 5 Most Popular Password Cracking Tools: Protect Your Company. Retrieved from https://thycotic.com/company/blog/2020/04/28/5-most-popular-password-cracking-tools-and-
how-to-protect-your-enterprise/
