Today passwords are used to control access to information, varying from personal identification numbers that we use for credit cards, automatic teller machines, telephone calling cards, and voice mail systems to more complex alphanumeric passwords that are used to protect access towards different files, network servers, and computer systems.
Today we will share with you the best password cracking tools. Passwords are being used as they are simple, less expensive and very convenient to use and implement. In short, we can say that passwords are the most common form of authentication.
On the other hand, passwords are also seemed to be a poor form of protection. The CERT that stands for Computer Emergency Response Team has calculated that about 80% of the security accidents occur due to the selection of poor passwords.
It is difficult to handle problems related to passwords as a single computer system may have hundreds or even thousands of password-protected accounts and only one needs to be compromised to give access to the attacker to enter the local system or network. Today problems are much devastating on a big scale because of the interconnected internet, a professional hacker might just enter into our computer system causing no harm but using it as a platform to attack a population of millions of targets.
What you SHOULD be doing to your passwords
- Always use a password with mixed case characters
- Always use a password that contains non-alphabetic characters like digits or punctuation
- Always use a password that is easy to remember
- Always use a password that can be typed in easily without looking at the keyboard
What NOT to do with your passwords
- You should not use your username or login in any form that includes as-is, capitalized, reversed, doubled, etc.
- You should not use in any way your first, middles, or last name
- You should not use the name of your spouse, significant other, children’s, pets, or friends
- You should not use such things in your password that highlight your date of birth, license plate number, telephone number, social security number, or house number
- You should not use such a password with the same letter or digits
- You should not use such a password whose words are present in the English dictionary, spelling lists, abbreviation lists, or other word lists
- You should not use a password that is less than six characters
- You should not, in any case, give your password to anyone for any reason.
Different Types of Password Attacks
The Dictionary Attack
A dictionary attack is an attack that is based on estimation guessing and uses a precompiled list of options. An option that is to work is tried only in this kind of attack and not all the options are gone forward with
Here the dictionary combinations are indeed based on possible values and do not tend to consider options of remote possibility. It might be based on the knowledge of one or a few ley information about the target that includes names of family members or even birthdays. Moreover, a dictionary is based on the combinations that are observed around a massive number of users in order to determine the most commonly used patterns. The dictionary usually includes real words other than random strings of characters.
The attack time over here is reduced as the number of combinations is restricted only to ones on the list.
The Brute Force attack
The brute force attack is an attack in which the hacker tries to get the password by trying out every possible combination of characters. Here the number of attempts gets restricted by maximum position and number of characters.
This takes a lot of time to complete but here there are more chances of coverage of likely clear text value ( all possibilities are seen when set to maximum length and every possible character is considered in every position). This is a combination lock that requires three numbers that are to be taken in a sequence and every possible combination needs to be tried on. For example first 1-2-3 and then 1-2-4
Such an attack may not use all the options in a sequenced manner. The advanced brute attack makes particular assumptions like complexity rules need uppercase, the first character must be upper than lower case.
Top 10 Best Password Cracker Tools that are Free to Download
RainbowCrack
The rainbow crack tool falls in the category of hash cracker tool. It uses the large-scale-time memory trade-off process (a process of computation where all plain text and hash pairs are calculated by using a chosen hash algorithm) for faster password cracking. Its results are stored in rainbow tables. Such a process takes much time, but as the table is set it is able to crack passwords faster. Such a tool is used for the Windows system and Linux.
Brutus Password Cracker
Brutus is a widely used online tool to crack passwords. It has a very fast pace. Is comes free of cost and can be operated in windows. It got released back in 2000. It supports HTTP for Basic Authentication, Pop3, Telnet, HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), FTP, SMB, and other types. Brutus supports multi-stage authentication engines and can also connect with 60 targets simultaneously. Its best features are; resume and load, use them to halt the process at any time and resume anytime.
Cain & Abel
This is a very popular password cracking tool. It is available on the Windows platform. It functions as a sniffer for cracking encrypted passwords, revealing cached passwords, cryptanalysis and much more
The tool does not exploit any bugs as it is only used to cover the security weakness of a protocol in order to grab the password.
Wfuzz
Wfuzz is a web application that is used to crack passwords using brute-forcing. The tool is used to find hidden resources like servlets, scripts, and directories. You can also identify different injections using Wfuzz like SQL/LDAP, XSS, etc. The tool is multi-threading, provides multiple proxy support and much more.
John the Ripper
This is another free open-source tool that is used to crack passwords in Linux, Mac OS, and UNIX. There is a version for windows as well. Such a tool is used to detect for weal passwords. The pro-version of the tool offers the best features with packages to test the target OS.
Download John The Ripper (Latest Version)
THC Hydra
This is one fast-paced network logon tool used for password cracking. You can easily install new modules in the tool and enhance features. It is available for Windows, free BSD, Linux, Solaris, and OS X. it supports many protocols like HTTP-FORM-POST, HTTP-PROXY, HTTP-GET, etc.
OphCrack
This is a rainbow table-based tool used for password cracking in windows. It comes in free. It can be used also on Linux and Mac. It is used to crack NTLM and LM hashes. Free Rainbow tables are made available for cracking windows 7/vista/XP. Live Ophcrack CD is available for simplification of cracking. The CD can be used to crack window-based passwords.
L0phtCrack
This is a substitute for Ophcrack. It attempts to crack Windows passwords from hashes. It utilizes the primary controller of the domain, workstations, network server, and active dictionary for cracking passwords. For guessing and generating a password it uses the brute force and dictionary attack. It was discontinued in 2006 and re-launched in 2009. The tool is available with an audit feature of the scheduled routine. You can set it on a daily, weekly or even monthly audit and it will start to scan on the scheduled time.
Medusa
Another password cracking tool out there is the medusa. It is considered as a speedy parallel, login brute forcing tool that is modular. The host, password, and username while cracking the password, carries a flexible input.
One must understand all the commands before utilizing the medusa tool as it is popular for being the command-line tool. The efficiency of the tool depends upon the connectivity of the network. On a local system, medusa is capable to test 2000 passwords per minute
The attacker is able to carry out parallel attacks at the same time in this tool. The tool allows you to crack passwords of different email accounts at the same time.
Download Medusa Password Cracker
Aircrack-ng
A password cracking tool is used to crack WPA or WEP passwords. It is used to first analyze wireless encrypted packets and then tries to crack passwords by cracking their algorithms. The FMS attack is done with other attacking methods. It is there for the windows system and Linux. Its CD is also made available in life.
Update: The majority of the above tools are also tested to work on the latest build of Windows 11.
Which Password Cracker is your favorite?
Well, in my opinion, you cannot just rely on the same tool. You will be changing tools depending on the complexity of the password to crack. I hope our list of the best password cracking tools for 2022 helps you pick one. We have also provided you with free download links to every tool listed. We have mentioned the importance of passwords and what should be done to make them unique. Follow tips to save yourself from weak passwords. Using the tool that best suits you is my best recommendation.