Yesterday, my friend Victor wanted to crack a wifi network (his, of course) using his MacBook Pro.
WiFi Crack for Mac allows users to crack open any kind of wireless network with utmost ease. This WiFi Cracker tool comes with powerful command line tools which help in collecting the WEP password from the network. WiFi Cracker Software can be used to hack through all sorts of wireless networks in and around your location. Discover the flow. This Mac OS X application guides you through a step-by-step process of cracking the security of a WEP based network and helps you crack it seamlessly. How to hack WiFi password with WiFi Crack? WiFi Crack chooses the specified WiFi networks and launches the powerful command line tools to obtain the wireless packets and get the WEP password. Hacking software, free download - Hacker X-8.9, Game Cheater OSX, Hackety Hack, and many more programs.
I told him to use the excellent VirtualBox images of Kali Linux from Offensive Security and aircrack-ng.
I had just forgotten that:
- Using advanced wireless features is impossible from a virtual machine
- Even if he used Kali Linux with a dual boot, installing the wireless drivers to make it work with the airport card is tiresome.
- Most (not
airmon-ng
) aircrack-ng tools can be installed on macOS with MacPorts, butairodump-ng
andaireplay-ng
crash.
So PLEASE, if you want to do other advanced networking things than network sniffing or what is described in this article, do yourself a favour and buy an USB adapter to use with the virtual machine.
There is a list on the website of aircrack-ng
, and I think the Alfa AWUS051NH v2 is great.Some people say it is expensive, but last time I checked on Google Shopping, it cost less than half an Apple mouse.
There are 3 steps:
- Identify the target acces point: name (= BSSID), MAC address (= SSID) and channel (~ radio frequency)
- Sniff the channel in monitor mode to retrieve:
- a beacon (easy)
- a handshake (= four-way handshake), or some frames of it (hard)
- Crack the password using the dump
What makes the retrieval of the handshake hard is that it appears only when somebody connects to the access point.
The good news is that you can deauthentificate people from the wifi network - it’s called wifi jamming and it’s useful to impress a girl and piss off people at Starbucks.When they reconnect, they re-send the handshake. That adds a Deauth step.
“Install”
Scan
It saves the .cap
capture file and displays the path.
If you don’t have the beacon or the handshake, it will fail accordingly.
For wordlists, see below.
As I said, aireplay-ng
doesn’t work on a MacBook Pro.The catch is that aireplay-ng
can do a lot of other things besides deauth attacks.
You might read that airport cards do not support packet injection, but packet injections are for WEP attacks and nobody uses WEP anymore. We only want to send some deauthentification frames.
Use JamWiFi. A ready-to-use application is provided there.
In fact, you can indentify the target with it too, and it has a really nice GUI.
Once you have selected the access point, you can deauth one or multiple users. Stop after about 50 “Deauths”, or else the persons might have trouble to reconnect during several minutes.
It might not work it you are too far from the target as your airport card is far less powerful than the router.
Using airport
presents some issues. You cannot know if you got the beacon and the handshake until you stop the capture and try with aircrack-ng
.
You capture a lot of unuseful packets too.
Using tcpdump
is more efficient.
When you launch those lines, the first tcpdump
easily captures a beacon and the second waits for the handshake.
Use JamWiFi to deauth some users, and when tcpdump
shows you it got 4 frames or more, Ctrl-C. It appears you can use less that 4 frames, but it depends on the frames you got (for instance 1,2 or 2,3 are sufficient). Anyway you should normally get at least 4. If nothing shows, try to deauth another user.
Now you have everything in capture.cap
. You can also run aircrack-ng
on it.
Like aireplay-ng
, aircrack-ng
offers so many features that it cannot be the best in everything.
We can really speed up the process by using hashcat.
Install with brew
Convert with cap2hccapx
hashcat
doesn’t take cap files, only hccapx files.
Just install hashcat-utils and use cap2hccapx
Alternatively, use this online tool.
Crack
This page provides some examples.
To use with a dictionnary:
You have a lot of other options, like brute force:
Refer to the documentation fot more patterns.
Speed
hashcat
works on the GPU.
On my MacBook Pro, it yields a performance of 5kH/s: it tests 5000 passwords in a second.
On a Tesla K20m, the speed is 75kH/s. I managed to crack the 5 last lowercase letters of a wifi password in about 1 minute (26**5 // 75000 = 158 seconds to test them all).
We can see here that a GTX 1080 breaks 400kH/s.
I recommend:
For more efficiency, target the networks with silly names (good examples are “mozart”, “I love cats”, “Harry and Sally”), and avoid the ones called “National Security Agency”, “sysadmin” and “sup3r h4x0r”.
To find a password, you have to be lucky and have a good idea of its shape.
A lot of default wifi passwords are composed of 8 or 10 hexadecimal digits.
In average (worst case divided by 2) and according to the above benchmark, with a GTX 1080:
- 8 hexadecimal characters take 90 minutes.
- 10 hexadecimal characters take 16 days.
- 12 hexadecimal characters take 11 years.
If you only want free wifi, just do MAC spoofing on a hotspot that uses web login.
Passwords are the most commonly used method for user authentication. Passwords are so popular because the logic behind them makes sense to people and they’re relatively easy for developers to implement.
However, passwords can also introduce security vulnerabilities. Password crackers are designed to take credential data stolen in a data breach or other hack and extract passwords from it.
What is password cracking?
A well-designed password-based authentication system doesn’t store a user’s actual password. This would make it far too easy for a hacker or a malicious insider to gain access to all of the user accounts on the system.
Instead, authentication systems store a password hash, which is the result of sending the password — and a random value called a salt — through a hash function. Hash functions are designed to be one-way, meaning that it is very difficult to determine the input that produces a given output. Since hash functions are also deterministic (meaning that the same input produces the same output), comparing two password hashes (the stored one and the hash of the password provided by a user) is almost as good as comparing the real passwords.
Password cracking refers to the process of extracting passwords from the associated password hash. This can be accomplished in a few different ways:
- Dictionary attack: Most people use weak and common passwords. Taking a list of words and adding a few permutations — like substituting $ for s — enables a password cracker to learn a lot of passwords very quickly.
- Brute-force guessing attack: There are only so many potential passwords of a given length. While slow, a brute-force attack (trying all possible password combinations) guarantees that an attacker will crack the password eventually.
- Hybrid attack: A hybrid attack mixes these two techniques. It starts by checking to see if a password can be cracked using a dictionary attack, then moves on to a brute-force attack if it is unsuccessful.
Most password-cracking or password finder tools enable a hacker to perform any of these types of attacks. This post describes some of the most commonly used password-cracking tools.
1. Hashcat
Hashcat is one of the most popular and widely used password crackers in existence. It is available on every operating system and supports over 300 different types of hashes.
Hashcat enables highly-parallelized password cracking with the ability to crack multiple different passwords on multiple different devices at the same time and the ability to support a distributed hash-cracking system via overlays. Cracking is optimized with integrated performance tuning and temperature monitoring.
Download Hashcat here.
2. John the Ripper
John the Ripper is a well-known free open-source password cracking tool for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. A Windows version is also available.
John the Ripper offers password cracking for a variety of different password types. It goes beyond OS passwords to include common web apps (like WordPress), compressed archives, document files (Microsoft Office files, PDFs and so on), and more.
A pro version of the tool is also available, which offers better features and native packages for target operating systems. You can also download Openwall GNU/*/Linux that comes with John the Ripper.
Download John the Ripper here.
3. 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.
Brutus supports a number of different authentication types, including:
- HTTP (basic authentication)
- HTTP (HTML Form/CGI)
- POP3
- FTP
- SMB
- Telnet
- IMAP
- NNTP
- NetBus
- Custom protocols
It is also capable of supporting multi-stage authentication protocols and can attack up to sixty different targets in parallel. It also offers the ability to pause, resume and import an attack.
Brutus has not been updated for several years. However, its support for a wide variety of authentication protocols and ability to add custom modules make it a popular tool for online password cracking attacks.
Get the Brutus password finder online here.
4. Wfuzz
Wfuzz is a web application password-cracking tool like Brutus that tries to crack passwords via a brute-force guessing attack. It can also be used to find hidden resources like directories, servlets and scripts. Wfuzz can also identify injection vulnerabilities within an application such as SQL injection, XSS injection and LDAP injection.
Key features of the Wfuzz password-cracking tool include:
- Injection at multiple points in multiple directories
- Output in colored HTML
- Post, headers and authentication data brute-forcing
- Proxy and SOCK support, multiple proxy support
- Multi-threading
- HTTP password brute-force via GET or POST requests
- Time delay between requests
- Cookie fuzzing
5. THC Hydra
THC Hydra is an online password-cracking tool that attempts to determine user credentials via brute-force password guessing attack. It is available for Windows, Linux, Free BSD, Solaris and OS X.
THC Hydra is extensible with the ability to easily install new modules. It also supports a number of network protocols, including Asterisk, AFP, Cisco AAA, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, CVS, Firebird, FTP, HTTP-FORM-GET, HTTP-FORM-POST, HTTP-GET, HTTP-HEAD, HTTP-PROXY, HTTPS-FORM-GET, HTTPS-FORM-POST, HTTPS-GET, HTTPS-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, ICQ, IMAP, IRC, LDAP, MS-SQL, MYSQL, NCP, NNTP, Oracle Listener, Oracle SID, Oracle, PC-Anywhere, PCNFS, POP3, POSTGRES, RDP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rsh, SAP/R3, SIP, SMB, SMTP, SMTP Enum, SNMP, SOCKS5, SSH (v1 and v2), Subversion, Teamspeak (TS2), Telnet, VMware-Auth, VNC and XMPP.
Download THC Hydra here.
If you are a developer, you can also contribute to the tool’s development.
6. Medusa
Medusa is an online password-cracking tool similar to THC Hydra. It claims to be a speedy parallel, modular and login brute-forcing tool. It supports HTTP, FTP, CVS, AFP, IMAP, MS SQL, MYSQL, NCP, NNTP, POP3, PostgreSQL, pcAnywhere, rlogin, SMB, rsh, SMTP, SNMP, SSH, SVN, VNC, VmAuthd and Telnet.
Wifi Hacker Software For Mac
Medusa is a command-line tool, so some level of command-line knowledge is necessary to use it. Password-cracking speed depends on network connectivity. On a local system, it can test 2,000 passwords per minute.
Medusa also supports parallelized attacks. In addition to a wordlist of passwords to try, it is also possible to define a list of usernames or email addresses to test during an attack.
Read more about this here.
Download Medusa here.
7. RainbowCrack
All password-cracking is subject to a time-memory tradeoff. If an attacker has precomputed a table of password/hash pairs and stored them as a “rainbow table,” then the password-cracking process is simplified to a table lookup. This threat is why passwords are now salted: adding a unique, random value to every password before hashing it means that the number of rainbow tables required is much larger.
RainbowCrack is a password cracking tool designed to work using rainbow tables. It is possible to generate custom rainbow tables or take advantage of preexisting ones downloaded from the internet. RainbowCrack offers free downloads of rainbow tables for the LANMAN, NTLM, MD5 and SHA1 password systems.
Download rainbow tables here.
A few paid rainbow tables are also available, which you can buy from here.
This tool is available for both Windows and Linux systems.
Download RainbowCrack here.
8. 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.
A live CD of OphCrack is also available to simplify the cracking. One can use the Live CD of OphCrack to crack Windows-based passwords. This tool is available for free.
Download OphCrack here.
Download free and premium rainbow tables for OphCrack here.
9. L0phtCrack
L0phtCrack is an alternative to OphCrack. It attempts to crack Windows passwords from hashes. For cracking passwords, it uses Windows workstations, network servers, primary domain controllers and Active Directory. It also uses dictionary and brute-force attacks for generating and guessing passwords. It was acquired by Symantec and discontinued in 2006. Later, L0pht developers again reacquired it and launched L0phtCrack in 2009.
Get Mac Wifi
L0phtCrack also comes with the ability to scan routine password security scans. One can set daily, weekly or monthly audits, and it will start scanning at the scheduled time.
Learn about L0phtCrack here.
10. Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a Wi-Fi password-cracking tool that can crack WEP or WPA/WPA2 PSK passwords. It analyzes wireless encrypted packets and then tries to crack passwords via the dictionary attacks and the PTW, FMS and other cracking algorithms. It is available for Linux and Windows systems. A live CD of Aircrack is also available.
Aircrack-ng tutorials are available here.
Download Aircrack-ng here.
How to create a password that’s hard to crack
In this post, we have listed 10 password-cracking tools. These tools try to crack passwords with different password-cracking algorithms. Most of the password cracking tools are available for free. So, you should always try to have a strong password that is hard to crack. These are a few tips you can try while creating a password.
- The longer the password, the harder it is to crack: Password length is the most important factor. The complexity of a brute force password guessing attack grows exponentially with the length of the password. A random seven-character password can be cracked in minutes, while a ten-character one takes hundreds of years.
- Always use a combination of characters, numbers and special characters: Using a variety of characters also makes brute-force password-guessing more difficult, since it means that crackers need to try a wider variety of options for each character of the password. Incorporate numbers and special characters and not just at the end of the password or as a letter substitution (like @ for a).
- Variety in passwords: Credential stuffing attacks use bots to test if passwords stolen from one online account are also used for other accounts. A data breach at a tiny company could compromise a bank account if the same credentials are used. Use a long, random, and unique password for all online accounts.
What to avoid while selecting your password
Cybercriminals and password cracker developers know all of the “clever” tricks that people use to create their passwords. A few common password mistakes that should be avoided include:
- Using a dictionary word: Dictionary attacks are designed to test every word in the dictionary (and common permutations) in seconds.
- Using personal information: A pet’s name, relative’s name, birthplace, favorite sport and so on are all dictionary words. Even if they weren’t, tools exist to grab this information from social media and build a wordlist from it for an attack.
- Using patterns: Passwords like 1111111, 12345678, qwerty and asdfgh are some of the most commonly used ones in existence. They’re also included in every password cracker’s wordlist.
- Using character substitutions: Character substitutions like 4 for A and $ for S are well-known. Dictionary attacks test for these substitutions automatically.
- Using numbers and special characters only at the end: Most people put their required numbers and special characters at the end of the password. These patterns are built into password crackers.
- Using common passwords: Every year, companies like Splashdata publish lists of the most commonly used passwords. They create these lists by cracking breached passwords, just like an attacker would. Never use the passwords on these lists or anything like them.
- Using anything but a random password: Passwords should be long, random, and unique. Use a password manager to securely generate and store passwords for online accounts.
Conclusion
Password-cracking tools are designed to take the password hashes leaked during a data breach or stolen using an attack and extract the original passwords from them. They accomplish this by taking advantage of the use of weak passwords or by trying every potential password of a given length.
Password finders can be used for a variety of different purposes, not all of them bad. While they’re commonly used by cybercriminals, security teams can also use them to audit the strength of their users’ passwords and assess the risk of weak passwords to the organization.