Anybody you meet will tell you that weak passwords are responsible for dozens of successful intrusions, both local and remote. As a trained network administrator, or security engineer, you have counselled users to make their passwords stronger many times. What you may not be aware of is that many technology professionals make weak passwords or patterns of passwords that endanger not just their own accounts, but the entire network that they maintain. This chapter will show you several tools for testing the passwords on your network, so you can help guide your users to the habit of better passwords.
We will learn the following topics in this chapter:
- Password attack planning
- Meet my friend, Johnny
- Meet Johnny's dad, John the Ripper
- Meet the ex—xHydra
It is the nature of hashing algorithms that all hashes should be about the same length, and it really...
