Password Cracking Tools

Password cracking and the associated password cracker tools are often the area of information security and hacking that people get most excited about, oh wow I can hack email passwords? We get emails pretty much every day asking how to crack someone's Facebook password, or retrieve website credentials etc.

What is Password Cracking?

As commonly defined:

In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that have been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to try guesses repeatedly for the password and check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password.

The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password (installing an entirely new password is less of a security risk, but it involves System Administration privileges), to gain unauthorized access to a system, or as a preventive measure by system administrators to check for easily crackable passwords. On a file-by-file basis, password cracking is utilized to gain access to digital evidence for which a judge has allowed access but the particular file's access is restricted.

From Wikipedia.

The Best Password Cracker Software

We have covered many of the most famous, some great examples are:

- Brutus Password Cracker – Download brutus-aet2.zip AET2
- THC-Hydra – The Fast and Flexible Network Login Hacking Tool
- Download pwdump 1.4.2 and fgdump 1.3.4 – Windows Password Dumping
- Cain & Abel – Download the Super Fast and Flexible Password Cracker with Network Sniffing
- JTR (Password Cracking) – John the Ripper 1.7 Released – FINALLY
- Ophcrack 2.2 Password Cracker Released
- hashcat – Multi-Threaded Password Hash Cracking Tool
- Medusa 2.0 Released – Parallel Network Login Brute Forcing Tool

And we have also published some related resources such as:

- Password Cracking Wordlists and Tools for Brute Forcing
- Password Cracking with Rainbowcrack and Rainbow Tables