UNIT 4 TOOLS AND METHODS USED IN CYBERCRIME

LECTURE- 20 PHISHING, PASSWORD CRACKING

 1. PHISHING
• Stealing personal and financial data
• Also can infect systems with viruses
• A method of online ID theft
• E-mail messages that spoof or mimic banks, credit card companies etc. They
look authentic but and attempt to get users to reveal their personal
information.
• E.g. fake bank threatening messages
• “Phishing” spelling is believed to be alternative of “fishing” = to fish for
information
• First documented use of word: “Phishing” =1996
 HOW PHISHING WORKS?
1. Planning : use mass mailing and address collection techniques-
spammers
2. Setup : E-Mail / webpage to collect data about the target
3. Attack : send a phony message to the target that appears to be
from reputable source.
4. Collection: record the information obtained entering into webpages
or pop-up windows.
5. Identity theft and fraud: use information to commit fraud or illegal
purchases
 2. PASSWORD CRACKING
• Password =key and computer=lock
• 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
• Help a user recover a forgotten password
• To gain unauthorized access to a system,
• Or as a preventive measure by system administrators to check for easily
crackable passwords
 Manual Password Cracking Algorithm
• Find a valid user
• Create a list of possible passwords
• Rank the passwords from high probability to low
• Key in each password
• If the system allows you in – Success
• Else try till success
 Examples Of Guessable Passwords
1. Blank
2. Words like “passcode” ,”password”, “admin”
3. Series of letters “QWERTY”
4. User’ s name or login name
5. Name of the user’s friend/relative/pet
6. User’s birth place, DOB
7. Vehicle number, office number ..
8. Name of celebrity
9. Simple modification of one of the precedings, suffixing 1 …
MOST POPULAR PASSWORD
CRACKING TOOLS.
1. Default Password(s) :
Network Devices such as switches, hubs and routers are equipped with
“default passwords” and usually these passwords are not changed after
commissioning these devices into the network (I.e. into LAN). The
intruders can gain the access using these default passwords by visiting
the said website.
 MOST POPULAR PASSWORD
CRACKING TOOLS.
2. Brutus
• Brutus is one of the most popular remote online password cracking tools. It claims to
be the fastest and most flexible password cracking tool. This tool is free and is only
available for Windows systems. It was released back in October 2000.
• It supports HTTP (Basic Authentication), HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), POP3, FTP, SMB,
Telnet and other types such as IMAP, NNTP, NetBus, etc

3. RainbowCrack-
is a hash cracker tool that uses a large-scale time-memory trade off process for faster
password cracking than traditional brute force tools. Time-memory trade off is a
computational process in which all plain text and hash pairs are calculated by using a
selected hash algorithm. After computation, results are stored in the rainbow table.
This process is very time consuming. But, once the table is ready, it can crack a
password must faster than brute force tools.
4. Cain and Abel
• The most notable thing is that the tool is only available for Windows platforms.
It can work as sniffer in the network, cracking encrypted passwords using the
dictionary attack, recording VoIP conversations, brute force attacks,
cryptanalysis attacks, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords,
decoding scrambled passwords, and analyzing routing protocols.
• Cain and Abel does not exploit any vulnerability or bugs. It only covers security
weakness of protocols to grab the password. This tool was developed for
network administrators, security professionals, forensics staff, and penetration
testers.
5. John the Ripper John the Ripper is another well-known free open source
password cracking tool for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. A Windows version is also
available. This tool can detect weak passwords. A pro version of the tool is also
available, which offers better features and native packages for target operating
system
6. THC Hydra
• THC Hydra is a fast network logon password cracking tool. When it is
compared with other similar tools, it shows why it is faster. New
modules are easy to install in the tool. You can easily add modules
and enhance the features. It is available for Windows, Linux, Free BSD,
Solaris and OS X. This tool supports various network protocols.
7. OphCrack
• OphCrack is a free rainbow-table based password cracking tool for
Windows. It is the most popular Windows password cracking tool, but
can also be used on Linux and Mac systems. It cracks LM and NTLM
hashes. For cracking Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, free rainbow-
tables are also available.
8. L0phtCrack
• L0phtCrack is an alternative to OphCrack. It attempts to crack
Windows password from hashes. For cracking passwords, it uses
Windows workstations, network servers, primary domain controllers,
and Active Directory. It also uses dictionary and brute force attacking
for generating and guessing passwords
9. Aircrack-NG
• Aircrack-NG is a WiFi password cracking tool that can crack WEP or
WPA passwords. It analyzes wireless encrypted packets and then tries
to crack passwords via its cracking algorithm. It uses the FMS attack
along with other useful attack techniques for cracking password. It is
available for Linux and Windows systems.
Categories Of Password Cracking Attacks:
1. Online attacks
2. Offline attacks
3. Non-electronic attacks
• Social engineering
• Shoulder surfing
• Dumpster diving
 ONLINE ATTACKS
• An attacker may create a script- automated program- to try each
password
• Most popular online attack;- man-in-the-middle attack or bucket-
brigade attack or “Janus Attack”.
• Used to obtain passwords for E-mail accounts on public websites like
gmail, yahoomail
• Also to get passwords for financial websites
 Offline attacks
• Are performed from a location other than the target where these
passwords reside or are used
• Require physical access to the computer and copying the password
file from the system onto removable media.
 TYPES OF PASSWORD ATTACKS
• Password Guessing/ Brute force Attack
• Attackers can guess passwords locally or remotely using either a manual or
automated approach e.g. Adm I n
• Dictionary attacks
• work on the assumption that most passwords consist of whole words, dates,
or numbers taken from a dictionary. E.g. administrator
• Hybrid password
• assume that network administrators push users to make their passwords at
least slightly different from a word that appears in a dictionary.
• E.g. Adm I n I strator.
 Weak passwords
• The password contains less than eight characters
• The password is a word found in a dictionary (English or foreign)
• The password is a common usage word such as:
• Names of family, pets, friends, co-workers, fantasy characters, etc.
• Computer terms and names, commands, sites, companies, hardware, software.
• The words "<Company Name>", "sanjose", "sanfran" or any derivation.
• Birthdays and other personal information such as addresses and phone numbers.
• Word or number patterns like aaabbb, qwerty, zyxwvuts, 123321, etc.
• Any of the above spelled backwards.
• Any of the above preceded or followed by a digit (e.g., secret1,1secret
 Strong Passwords

• Contain both upper and lower case characters (e.g., a-z, A-Z)
• Have digits and punctuation characters as well as letters e.g., 0-9, @#$%^&*()_+|
~-=\`{}[]:";'<>?,./)
• Are at least eight alphanumeric characters long.
• Are not a word in any language, slang, dialect, jargon, etc.
• Are not based on personal information, names of family, etc.
• Passwords should never be written down or stored on-line.
• Try to create passwords that can be easily remembered.
• One way to do this is create a password based on a song title, affirmation, or other
phrase.
• For example, the phrase might be: "This May Be One Way To Remember"
• and the password could be: "TmB1w2R!" or "Tmb1W>r~" or some other variation.
 Random passwords

1. Secure Password Generator

2. Password Length:
• Include Symbols: ( e.g. @#$% )
• Include Numbers: ( e.g. 123456 )
• Include Lowercase Characters: ( e.g. abcdefgh )
• Include Uppercase Characters: ( e.g. ABCDEFGH )
• Exclude Similar Characters: ( e.g. i, l, 1, L, o, 0, O )
• Exclude Ambiguous Characters: ( { } [ ] ( ) / \ ' " ` ~ , ; : . < > )
3. Generate On The Client Side: ( do NOT send across the Internet )
4. Auto-Select: ( select the password automatically )
5.Save My Preference: ( save all the settings above for later use )
6. Load My Settings Anywhere: URL to load my settings on other computers quickly
7. Your New Password: Remember your password with the first letters of each word in this sentence.
 Random passwords

To prevent your passwords from being hacked by social engineering, brute

force or dictionary attack method, you should notice that:
• 1. Do not use the same password for multiple important accounts.
• 2. Use a password that has at least 16 characters, use at least one number,
one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and one special symbol.
• 3. Do not use the names of your families, friends or pets in your passwords.
• 4. Do not use postcodes, house numbers, phone numbers, birthdates, ID card
numbers, social security numbers, and so on in your passwords.
• 5. Do not use any dictionary word in your passwords.
• 6. Do not use something that can be cloned( but you can't change ) as your
passwords, such as your fingerprints.
 Random passwords
7. Do not let your Web browsers( FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE ) store your
passwords, since all passwords saved in Web browsers can be revealed easily.
8. Do not log in to important accounts on the computers of others, or when
connected to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, Tor, free VPN or web proxy.
9. Do not send sensitive information online via HTTP or FTP connections, because
messages in these connections can be sniffed with very little effort. You should use
encrypted connections such as HTTPS and SFTP whenever possible.
10. When travelling, you can encrypt your Internet connections before they leave
your laptop, tablet, mobile phone or router. For example, you can set up a private
VPN on your own server( home computer, dedicated server or VPS ) and connect to
it. Alternatively, you can set up an encrypted SSH tunnel between your router and
your home computer( or a remote server of your own ) with PuTTY and connect
your programs( e.g. FireFox ) to PuTTY.
Random passwords

• 11. How secure is my password? Perhaps you believe that your passwords are very strong,
difficult to hack. But if a hacker has stolen your username and the MD5 hash value of your
password from a company's server, and the rainbow table of the hacker contains this MD5
hash, then your password will be cracked quickly.
•      To check the strength of your passwords and know whether they're inside the popular
rainbow tables, you can convert your passwords to MD5 hashes on this MD5 hash generator,
then decrypt your passwords by submitting these hashes to an online MD5 decryption
service. For instance, your password is "0123456789A", using the brute-force method, it may
take a computer almost one year to crack your password, but if you decrypt it by submitting
its MD5 hash( C8E7279CD035B23BB9C0F1F954DFF5B3 ) to a MD5 decryption website, how
long will it take to crack it? You can perform the test yourself.
• 12. It's recommended to change your passwords every 10 weeks.
 Random passwords

13. It's recommended that you remember a few master passwords, store other
passwords in a plain text file and encrypt this file with 7-Zip, GPG or a disk
encryption software such as Bit-Locker, or manage your passwords with a password
management software.
14. Encrypt and backup your passwords to different locations, then if you lost
access to your computer or account, you can retrieve your passwords back quickly.
15. Turn on 2-step authentication whenever possible.
16. Do not store your critical passwords in the cloud.
17. Access important websites( e.g. Paypal ) from bookmarks directly, otherwise
please check its domain name carefully, it's a good idea to check the popularity of a
website with Alexa toolbar to ensure that it's not a phishing site before entering
your password.
 Random passwords
• 18. Protect your computer with firewall and antivirus software,
download software from reputable sites only, and verify the MD5 or
SHA1 checksum of the installation package whenever possible.
• 19. Be careful when using online paste tools and screen capture tools,
do not let them to upload your passwords to the cloud.
• 20. If there are important files on your computer, and it can be
accessed by others, check if there are hardware keyloggers( e.g.
wireless keyboard sniffer ), software keyloggers and hidden cameras
when you feel it's necessary.
• 21. If you're a webmaster, do not store the users passwords in the
database.