Another article discussing the legendary l0phtcrack password cracking and auditing tool. Works on crypt, NTLM Windows passwords, and many other types. Great stuff. It's official: The famous password-cracking tool L0phtCrack is back, and its creators plan to keep it that way. L0phtCrack 6 tool, released Wednesday, was developed in 1997 by Christien Rioux, Chris Wysopal, and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko from the former L0pht Heavy Industries -- the hacker think tank best known for testifying before Congress that it could shut down the Internet in 30 minutes. In January of this year, Rioux, Wysopal, and Zatko bought back L0phtCrack from Symantec, and later announced they would build a new version of the tool with support for 64-bit Windows platforms and other new features. . "When Symantec stopped supporting L0phtCrack [in 2005], a lot of people were still using it. They left their customers high and dry," says Mudge, who, along with his co-developers, had initially worried that could happen. "We had clauses in place so that if Symantec ever did cease to support and maintain it, we could have certain options [to get it back]. We didn't want somebody to take it from us and deep-six it. We thought it was a useful tool." The link for this article located at Dark Reading is no longer available. . Back again, L0phtCrack rises! Brought forth by famed hacking pioneers, this application gears up for a fresh chapter in password security assessment.. L0phtCrack, Password Auditing, Password Cracking Tool, Cybersecurity, Open Source Tool. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sex, Drugs, Money...How many of these words are common passwords on your network? The answer is probably too many. For beginners and even seasoned Linux security veterans, this should be something that needs to be consistantly checked. . . . Sex, Drugs, Money...How many of these words are common passwords on your network? The answer is probably too many. For beginners and even seasoned Linux security veterans, this should be something that needs to be consistantly checked. This article comes about because of a recent thread on the security-basics mailing list regarding password crackers. Akin to this topic are the passwords themselves. The average user has a mildly uncomplicated password; generally not even a combination of upper and lower case characters or even any numbers. The fact of the matter is that passwords are an important piece of the security puzzle. More times than not, the average user is the one that you are working for. SysAdmins, if taking a look at your users password's are not a piece of your agenda, make it one. I am not saying that it must be done every day, but what easier way to break into a system than an easy to guess password. My first suggestion would be to do a sanity check on your password file. Run a password cracker on the password file and see how many usernames are broken in the first 10 min, or even the first hour. Odds are someone more patient than you would like to have access to your network. Another thing to keep in mind when looking at passwords is to never allow one of your users to use a 1337 version password. The problem is that they are based on dictionary words, with simple, common letter substitutions. In password cracking metrics, this is only one step up (common permutations) from a plain dictionary attack. Do not base your passwords on dictionary words, phonetic misspellings, names, slang, etc. One idea suggested on the mailing list was to do a 'strings -8 /dev/urandom' and then pick something from the first screenful that you or your usercan memorize. This is a random way of generating a password that even allows you to choose something easy for you. Listed below are a few tools that can be used for password auditing. Run one of them against your password file and notify all the users whose passwords were figured out they need to use more complicated passwords. Something else that may be worth your while is to look into password generators. They are many good freely available password generators. You should always use whichever method is best for you. Password Generators: Passsafe L33t-5p34K G3n3r@t0r Java Password Generator hichac Generates Passwords and puts them into an apache .htaccess file. Password Crackers: Perl Crack John the Ripper Crack 5.0a . Investigate frequent password mistakes and safeguard your users' accounts through robust password handling strategies.. Password Security, User Education, Auditing Tools. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Get the latest Linux and open source security news straight to your inbox.