When we are attempting 5 logins every second for an average password dictionary around 10, passwords , this is likely going to be flagged by almost any type of logging and alerting mechanism. Additionally, most applications are protected with account lockouts. Here comes one of the most obvious statements: The difference between offline and online password attacks is that… offline password attacks are offline. Great, but what does that mean?
How could a password attack be offline? Well in some cases, an attacker can get a hash of your password that they can take offline and try to crack it. A hash is just a one-way form of encryption. Instead, it hashes your password and saves that. So, for example, if your password is Password your computer will store: 42fade7f9ebff37a44cafcb.
Now when you login to your computer, the computer takes what you put in the password prompt, computes a hash, and compares that hash with the one it stored when you set your password. If the passwords match, you are granted access. An offline password attack will take this hash offline and try to find the clear-text value that computes to that hash. To do this, an attacker will use a computer or a beefed up computer to take passwords, compute the hash, and compare them very quickly. This will be performed over and over again until a match is found.
In terms of advantages, the difference between offline and online password attacks is huge. In an offline password attack, the attacker is never actually attempting to login to the application server. This means it is invisible to the security team and logs. This also means that common protections such as account lockouts will not work. This is because the attacker is going to take it offline, find the password, and then only one correct attempt will be registered by the application.
Another major difference between offline and online password attacks is speed. While online password attacks are limited by the speed of the network, offline password attacks are limited only by the speed of the computer the attacker is using to crack them.
That means that an 8 character password can be brute forced every possible combination of characters in less than 3 days. Ok, so knowing that offline password attacks are much more dangerous, the next logical question is how do attackers get the hashed password that they can take offline.
Knowing all this, the next step is to protect your password. In order to do this, we recommend taking a layered approach, as there is no silver bullet to protect against password attacks. In this blog we explored the difference between offline and online password attacks.
We covered why offline password attacks are much more likely to be successful, and how an attacker is likely to get password hashes offline in order to perform these attacks. Finally, we covered three broad options to protect your passwords better. Our gap analysis is an interview-driven process which comprehensively explores your current security policies, procedures, and techniques. This assessment involves a comprehensive audit on all the ways electronic protected health information ePHI is stored, processed, or transmitted on your network.
Our gap analysis is an interview-driven process which comprehensively explores your current security policies, processes, and infrastructure against General Data Protection Regulation GDPR Requirements. Topics include:. Our consultants have conducted countless PCI Compliance Assessments, filling out numerous Reports on Compliance and Self Assessment Questionnaires for organizations across a wide variety of industries.
Lower level merchants and service providers can leverage a Qualified Security Assessor QSA to assist them with determining their scope, what PCI requirements pertain to their organization, and assist with filling out their applicable Self Assessment Questionnaire SAQ.
Further, the SAQ will reflect that you had a QSA assist you, demonstrating to your clients and merchant bank that you had an unbiased third-party assess your compliance. A formal risk assessment evaluates the threats to your organization, the vulnerabilities of your network, and the security controls you have in place to protect your network. A risk assessment correlates information from your security assessments and evaluates the overall risk to your organization to help drive strategic decisions.
Our best practice gap analysis is an interview based review of your information security program. Some of the areas covered include:. Have a need not mentioned? This is known as credential stuffing and is very popular in the age of data breaches. The attacker might also add passwords from other leaked accounts. In such a scenario, the chance of a successful dictionary attack increases substantially.
If users were to choose strong passwords that contain not only one word, such attacks would quickly downgrade to a simple brute force attack. In case you use a password manager, then generating a random set of symbols is the best choice.
Spidering is a supplementary password cracking technique that helps with the above-mentioned brute force and dictionary attacks. It involves gathering information about the victim , usually a company, presuming that it uses some of that info for password creation.
The goal is to create a word list that would help guess the password faster. While guessing is far from the most popular password cracking technique, it relates to business-oriented spidering above.
If you recall using one or more of the pathetic passwords in the list below, we strongly recommend changing them now. Some of the most common passwords worldwide:. Those often include names of pets, lovers, pet-lovers, ex-pets, or something related to the actual service, like its name lowercase.
As mentioned above, one of the first things to do when password cracking is getting the password in the form of a hash. Then you create a table of common passwords and their hashed versions and check if the one you want to crack matches any entries. Experienced hackers usually have a rainbow table that also involves leaked and previously cracked passwords, making it more effective.
Most often, rainbow tables have all possible passwords that make them extremely huge , taking up hundreds of GBs. On the other hand, they make the actual attack faster because most of the data is already there and you only need to compare it with the targeted hash-password.
Luckily, most users can protect themselves from such attacks with large salts and key stretching, especially when using both. If the salt is large enough, say bit, two users with the same password will have unique hashes. This means that generating tables for all salts will take an astronomical amount of time.
As for the key stretching, it increases the hashing time and limits the number of attempts that the attacker can make in given time. No password cracking starts without proper tools.
When you have to guess from billions of combinations, some computational assistance is more than welcome. As always, each tool has its pros and cons. Here is a list, in no particular order, of the most popular password cracking tools.
Featured in many popular password cracking tools lists, John the Ripper is a free, open-source, command-based application. Word lists used in password cracking are on sale, but free options are available as well.
This is a multi-purpose tool, capable of many different functions. If you already have the hash, this tool will offer a dictionary or brute force attack option. Ophcrack is a free and open-source password cracking tool that specializes in rainbow table attacks. As you can see in the screenshot above, it took Ophcrack merely six seconds to crack an 8-symbol password while using a rainbow table that includes letters, numbers, and uppercases.
Ophcrack is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Arguably the strongest point of THC Hydra is not the possible number of heads it can grow but the sheer number of protocols it supports that seems to be growing too!
The methods available with THC Hydra include brute force and dictionary attacks while also using wordlists generated by other tools. This password cracker is known for its speed thanks to the multi-threaded combination testing. It can even run checks on different protocols simultaneously. It offers a number of techniques, from simple brute force attack to hybrid mask with wordlist. This makes cracking multiple hashes simultaneously much faster.
But what makes this tool truly universal is the number of supported hash types. In fact, it supports over hash types. But before you can start cracking, you need to have the password hash first. Where dictionary attacks use lists of all possible phrase and word combinations, mask attacks are far more specific in their scope, often refining guesses based on characters or numbers — usually founded in existing knowledge.
For example, if a hacker is aware that a password begins with a number, they will be able to tailor the mask to only try those types of passwords. Password length, the arrangement of characters, whether special characters are included, or how many times a single character is repeated are just some of the criteria that can be used to configure the mask. The goal here is to drastically reduce the time it takes to crack a password, and remove any unnecessary processing. In order to bypass this, hackers maintain and share directories that record passwords and their corresponding hashes, often built from previous hacks, reducing the time it takes to break into a system used in brute force attacks.
Rainbow tables go one step further, as rather than simply providing a password and its hash, these store a precompiled list of all possible plain text versions of encrypted passwords based on a hash algorithm. Much of the computation is done before the attack takes place, making it far easier and quicker to launch an attack, compared to other methods.
The downside for cyber criminals is that the sheer volume of possible combinations means rainbow tables can be enormous, often hundreds of gigabytes in size.
Network analysers are tools that allow hackers to monitor and intercept data packets sent over a network and lift the plain text passwords contained within. Such an attack requires the use of malware or physical access to a network switch, but it can prove highly effective.
Of course, businesses can use these same tools to scan their own networks , which can be especially useful for running diagnostics or for troubleshooting. Using a network analyser, admins can spot what information is being transmitted in plain text, and put policies in place to prevent this from happening.
The only way to prevent this attack is to secure the traffic by routing it through a VPN or something similar. Spidering refers to the process of hackers getting to know their targets intimately in order to acquire credentials based on their activity. How a hacker might use spidering will depend on the target. For example, if the target is a large company, hackers may attempt to source internal documentation, such as handbooks for new starters, in order to get a sense of the sort of platforms and security the target uses.
Hackers are able to exploit this by studying the products that a business creates in order to build a hitlist of possible word combinations, which can be used to support a brute force attack. As is the case with many other techniques on this list, the process of spidering is normally supported by automation.
In fact, most of the work takes place offline, particularly as most systems place limits on the number of guesses allowed before an account is locked. Offline hacking usually involves the process of decrypting passwords by using a list of hashes likely taken from a recent data breach. Without the threat of detection or password form restrictions, hackers are able to take their time. Of course, this can only be done once an initial attack has been successfully launched, whether that's a hacker gaining elevated privileges and accessing a database, by using a SQL injection attack , or by stumbling upon an unprotected server.
You might think the idea of someone looking over your shoulder to see your password is a product of Hollywood, but this is a genuine threat, even in Brazen examples of this include hackers disguising themselves in order to gain access to company sites and, quite literally, look over the shoulders of employees to grab sensitive documents and passwords.
Security experts recently warned of a vulnerability in the authentication process used by WhatsApp.
0コメント