Introduction

Password cracking is the process of determining the password for a given account or system. It has become more popular as hackers have discovered that many corporate passwords are predictable and that they can use this information to gain access to computers and networks. In addition, it can be used to test whether you’re still protected by a strong password (if so, change it!). 

CrackStation 

It is a password cracker that automatically searches a site for any account that has been registered on it. It then uses a brute-force attack to crack the passwords of all of those accounts –  

1) You can use it yourself to test the strength of your passwords. If you’ve got a weak one, this tool will let you know just how bad it really is! 

2) You can use it with your boss or your clients. They can get an analysis of their accounts and see if they need to make any changes! 

Ophcrack 

Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It can be used to crack Windows passwords using rainbow tables, which are pre-computed lists of hash values for common passwords. This tool has been developed by Thomas Roth and is available for free for personal use. 

The ophcrack utility was first released in 1996 by Thomas Roth and Marc Stevens at Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT/CC team. The program was originally written as a research project. The authors wrote it because they wanted an automated way to test their theories about how passwords were stored within Windows NT systems. Also, to know what would happen when someone tried them out against different types of machines that varied widely enough from each other as well as from older versions of NT/2000/XP, etc. 

John the Ripper 

John the Ripper is a free and open-source password-cracking tool for Unix-like systems. It runs on many operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, and IRIX. The latest version of John (1.9.0) has been released in 2019 and is available from the project website. 

John supports SSL/TLS connection encryption and password spraying attacks such as dictionary attacks or rainbow tables generation (a variation of Brute Force). It can also crack passwords using rainbow tables if your target platform supports it (e.g., Windows NT 4). John can be used in distributed computing environments via PGP key exchange services like TorqueBox or GridGain. It allows you to connect machines together without requiring direct access between them directly. This allows them all access simultaneously without slowing down performance due to increased load among other things like CPU usage etc. 

Brutus Password Cracker 

Brutus is a password-cracking tool that can be used to crack passwords in an automated fashion. It will try to brute force the password of a given user, and after some attempts, you’ll be prompted to specify how many attempts should be made before Brutus stops trying. 

Also, it accepts two parameters: -t, which specifies the number of seconds to wait between attempts; and -n, which specifies how many passwords to attempt. 

Cain & Abel 

Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force, and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, and analyzing HTTP cookies. 

Cain & Abel can also be used to recover usernames from websites that use partial matching (such as “username1” rather than “john_doe”). 

THC Hydra 

THC Hydra is a brute-force cracker. It can be used to perform password attacks and crack existing passwords and hashes. It also supports dictionary attacks with custom wordlists or using built-in lists of words (e.g., /etc/passwd). 

THC Hydra supports multiple hosts and CPU cores, meaning that you can use this tool on a single host or across several ones simultaneously if needed! 

RainbowCrack 

RainbowCrack is a password-cracking tool that uses the Hashcat algorithm. It can be used on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The software is free and open source, so you don’t have to pay for it unless you want to donate some money for this purpose. RainbowCrack supports GPU mining and CPU mining methods like dictionary or brute force attacks. 

Aircrack-ng 

Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools for auditing wireless networks. It was written by Thomas d’Otreppe and is based on the original Aircrack code. 

Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to audit wireless networks, which includes: 

• aircrack-ng – The main program that performs cryptographic key cracking using WEP and WPA/WPA2 authentication methods (including EAP). This tool can also recover WPA/WPA2 passphrases from captured data without knowing their keys (using a “known plaintext” attack). 

• airmon-ng – Monitor Airbase stations and obtain information about their capabilities such as channel frequency, mode, signal level, etc. The output format can be customized based on your needs including HTML or JSON formats. You can also choose whether you want to display only certain types by filtering them out beforehand so that only those items appear in your report. Like APs showing up with valid MAC addresses but no operating mode selected. Finally, there’s support for customizing how long reports should last before being removed automatically allowing users who aren’t interested in seeing everything still get some peace while waiting! 

Medusa 

Medusa is a python-based password-cracking tool. It can be used to crack passwords from various protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, and SMB. Medusa also has a built-in module for HTML and JavaScript Web sites to extract information about your site’s users, such as username, email address, and more. 

Ncrack 

Ncrack is a network authentication cracking tool that can perform a dictionary attack on multiple protocols. It can run on Windows and Linux platforms and uses the open-source Nmap port scanner as a base. The program’s developers claim that it’s faster than most other tools in this category because it doesn’t require you to download large databases of passwords before running your scans, as many of its competitors do—instead, Ncrack will try every login combination until one password works! 

W3af 

W3af is a web application security assessment framework that can be used to find vulnerabilities in websites, web applications, and services. It offers a robust set of features designed to test the security of your website or application by simulating real-world attacks against it. 

The tool uses ML techniques to identify common coding mistakes that hackers use to bypass defenses such as SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS). The program also checks for common configuration errors, insecure directory structures, weak passwords, and other issues that make your site vulnerable to attack. 

Password Cracking Is Not Hard, It Requires Time and Effort 

We need to use the tools that are designed for it. The best part is that there are many tools available, and they can be used in several ways. The first thing you should keep in mind when using any kind of password recovery software or tool is that all these programs have a similar purpose. That is, recovering your lost passwords from an encrypted file or data source such as a database or web server log file.  

Conclusion 

The best password-cracking tool is the one that allows you to recover your password in the shortest time possible. And, with the least amount of effort. If you want to crack into a system that uses passwords, then these are the tools you need to use. These tools will analyze the information that you give them. And most of the time they will be able to return with a list of passwords that the system uses.