SecuraBit before it Bytes

Courtesy of Bart Hopper:

By now, most people know that you should have a complex password of at least 8 characters that are composed of upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation marks and ,as Dilbert said, doodles, sign language and squirrel noises. Your password requirements are so secure that it would take a Beowulf cluster 10,000,000 years to crack. Your users know that if they write down their passwords on a post-it-note, they will be shot. Are your passwords secure?

The problem with a “good password” is that it is extremely difficult to remember. Passwords that are used daily can be easily remembered after a few days. Passwords that are used infrequently can be a point of vulnerability.

Unfortunately, password aging systems do not consider the frequency of use or the number of unsuccessful login attempts prior to a successful login. Sure, you can reset the error count before lockout after x number of minutes but, it treats all accounts equally. An attacker could come in “low and slow” by limiting password attempts to every 3 minutes.

If your password aging rules dictate that all passwords must be changed every 30 days, the password that is only used every two weeks will expire at the same interval as the password that is used 5 times per day. A better method for password aging systems would be to consider the number of times a password is used and maintain a counter of unsuccessful logins before a successful login in addition to a maximum password lifetime. How would this be an improvement?

If you have a complex password that is only used once every two weeks, you will probably need to write it down somewhere that is (hopefully) secure. If you don’t write it down, you may forget your password, requiring a password reset. Password resets are the unsung vulnerability in password management. Many organizations do not properly authenticate the person requesting a password reset, reset passwords to a default value, or send the new password to the user in an insecure method. Social engineering can often bypass the “authorized password requestor” list. Are your passwords really secure?

Thanks to Mubix for his posting on ZDNet, below you will find a link that describes all of the latest tools that were presented at Defcon 16.  Use them at your own discretion and make sure you have permission if using them on an enterprise network!  As Mubix has no control over the ZDnet posting, you can visit his site and keep up-to-date on the latest happenings.

Latest tools from DC16!

And if Jay Beale is reading this, we want Middler to come out!

So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you should be quite familiar with the term “rainbow tables” and know how unbelievably awesome these are.  A fellow colleague and I were in a pinch the other day and had no way of cracking an md5 hashed password as we simply didn’t have access to a set of rainbow tables, nor did we have time to wait for 0phcrack and JTR to brute force it.  So we stumbled across a free site that has over 1.6 million known hashes available.

The site is called Hash Mash and it simply allows you to plug in the md5 and just hit decrypt or create an md5 using the encrypt tab.  Rainbow tables work unbelievably fast and has helped many people in my situation as well as the forensics field.  However be aware that if the password is encrypted then you will run into some issues that will require a higher level of understanding in order to break the encryption, for starters, knowing the original encryption algorithm being used.  Be sure to check this site out for all of your “ethical” cracking needs.

**If you are in the position to download rainbow tables for offline use then you can visit the Shmoo Group and download them there too.  Happy cracking [|:) <-my interpretation of a white hat.