Password Cracking ‘Pass The Hash’ style

One of the most time consuming tasks a penetration tester has to face is password attacks. Traditional password attacks involve password guessing, password cracking or a combination of both. While the first can take anything from days to months, the latter can take from hours to days, depending on the quality of the password dictionary and the available CPU power among others. Tools that make use of Rainbow Tables, like Ophcrack, have significantly reduced those times to hours or even minutes, especially for systems that use weak password schemes like LM or NTLMv1.

All of the above describe how the password attack picture was before a new technique, called ‘Pass-The-Hash’ made its way into the hacking scene. Although someone may think this technique is quite new, it was actually back in 1997 when Paul Ashton posted on Bugtraq a Windows exploit named “NT Pass the Hash” along with the theory which the exploit was based on. This Unix-based tool implemented a modified version of a SMB client that allowed the use of captured LanMan hashes, without having to decrypt them first. However, it wasn’t before last year when Core Security finally took this concept to the next level and produced a much more powerful tool called ‘Pass-The-Hash Toolkit’, which now runs on Windows and works with NTLM hashes. Let’s see how this technique works in more detail.

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Cracking into embedded devices and beyond!

As promised in my previous post, I have  just uploaded Cracking into embedded devices and beyond, Adrian Pastor’s presentation at ‘Hack in The Box’ Dubai 2008.

Thanks Adrian for your promptly response when asked for the slides and congratulations for your excellent contribution to the security community. Hope we can share a pint next time I’m in London. Un abrazo!

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