Chapter 6. Password Attacks

Anybody you meet will tell you that weak passwords are responsible for dozens of successful intrusions, both local and remote. As a trained network administrator or security engineer, you have counselled users to make their passwords stronger many times. What you may not be aware of is that many technology professionals make weak passwords or patterns of passwords that endanger not just their own accounts, but the entire network which they maintain. This chapter will show you several tools for testing the passwords on your network, so you can help guide your users to the habit of better passwords:

• Password Attack Planning
• Creating or Adapting Password Lists
• Tools for Creative Password Cracking
• Meet My Friend Johnny
• Meet Johnny's Dad, John the Ripper
• Meet the Ex – xHydra

It is the nature of hashing algorithms to have all hashes be about the same length, and it really doesn't seem any more likely that someone could crack this algorithm as following...