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2004-11-09 08:07:40 ET http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj2600/43104.html Some guy posts some password file from some MIT server (MIT, for those of you who don't know, means Massachussets(sp?) Institute of Technology.) It might be a honepot (for those of you who don't know: honeypot = system set up to catch hackers) or it might be a real security breach (breach not by somebody from outside the system but by a stupid deed inside the system.) Either way I copied the file and am running John the Ripper (a popular pasword cracking program) on it. Why? Cause I like cracking passwords. I make up my own and see how long it takes John to crack it. Ofcourse it usually takes a while because John the Ripper comes withh a very small dictionary file (the most common and useful password attacks are: the dictionary attack and the brute force attack. The dictionary attack takes words from a dictionary type listing and encrypts them using the same encryption method as was used for the original password. If the encrypted result matches the result in the password file then the encrypted word from the dictionary file matches the encrypted password in the password file then word = password. Brute forcing is different. It's basically trying out all possible combinations of allowable characters to guess the password. A small dictionary file means that there aren't a lot of words that the password cracker tries. Like, for example, a popular password might be: qwerty. So John the Ripper has "qwerty" in its password file but it doesn't have a word like "ballpark" and so if you have "ballpark" as your password then John the Ripper will have to brute force that password to get it.) At the current count I have cracked 100 passwords and have 127 passwords left to crack. John the Ripper is brute forcing now which is why it's taking so long. Plus I'm running it on a slow laptop. |
