Password Cracking

Generating Password Mutations

  • Followig are the symbols used to create rules in hashcat.

:	    Do nothing.
l	    Lowercase all letters.
u	    Uppercase all letters.
c	    Capitalize the first letter and lowercase others.
sXY	    Replace all instances of X with Y.
$!	    Add the exclamation character at the end.
  • Command to create wordlist using rules:

# Rules are available at /usr/share/hashcat/rules/
hashcat --force password.list -r rule --stdout | sort -u > mut_password.list

Cracking Protected Archives

# Use John to crack protected files
office2john, ssh2john, pdf2john, zip2john, bitlocker2john etc

# Cracking OpenSSL Encrypted Archives
## Using a for-loop to Display Extracted Contents
for i in $(cat rockyou.txt);do openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -in $NAME.gzip -k $i 2>/dev/null| tar xz;done

Generating Wordlists Using CeWL

Windows Password Attacks

Attacking SAM

  • hklm\sam Contains the hashes associated with local account passwords. We will need the hashes so we can crack them and get the user account passwords in cleartext.

  • hklm\system Contains the system bootkey, which is used to encrypt the SAM database. We will need the bootkey to decrypt the SAM database.

  • hklm\security Contains cached credentials for domain accounts. We may benefit from having this on a domain-joined Windows target.

  • Dumping hashes remotely:

Attacking LSSAS

Attacking NTDS.dit

  • From windows host:

  • From linux host:

  • Enumerating users with reversible encryption enabled:

Secretsdump.py will save reversible passwords in plain text.

Credential Hunting

Windows Lateral Movement

Pass The Hash (PtH)

  • From windows host:

  • From linux host:

UAC (User Account Control) limits local users' ability to perform remote administration operations. When the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy is set to 0, it means that the built-in local admin account is the only local account allowed to perform remote administration tasks. Setting it to 1 allows the other local admins as well.

Pass the Key or OverPass the Hash

Pass The Ticket (PtT)

  • From windows host:

  • You can also monitor Kerberos tickets using Rubeus:

  • From linux host:

  • Using Linux Attack Tools with Kerberos:

We can convert ccache files in kribi format to use them in windows: impacket-ticketConverter krb5cc_ name.kirbi

  • Using linikatz to extract all creds from system

Linux Password Attacks

Credential Hunting

Reading important files

  • Reading important credential files in linux:

  • Cracking credentials in shadow file

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