Chapter 15. Password Crackers

There are password crackers for almost every password-protected system available. A quick search on the Internet identifies password crackers for Windows NT, UNIX, Novell, PGP, Word, VNC, pcAnywhere, Lotus Notes, Cisco routers, WinZip, and many others. Password crackers can be effective tools to use during penetration testing to help ensure users are selecting strong passwords. If a strong password is used, password crackers can take weeks, months, or even years to crack it. If a weak password is used, the cracker could succeed in hours, minutes, or even seconds. In this chapter we concentrate on OS-specific password crackers and describe their use during testing.