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10 Best Password Cracking Tools

Password cracking is done by password hacking tools. These tools repeatedly guess the password by trying several combinations to get original one.
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A password is a secret word or phrase usually used to confirm the user's identity. It can be a combination of characters, integers, and special symbols. The password allows users to access the specific network or service. Every user has their own password for a particular service or a network to confirm their identity. It is the most common method to authenticate a user.

Now let's move to password cracking. Password cracking is a method to extract the password from the associated password hash. It can be used to recover the forgotten password. Some people negatively use this process to gain unauthorized access to a system by breaking the admin's or another user's password. Most password cracking attacks are successful because of weak and easy-to-guess passwords.

Password cracking is done by password hacking tools. These tools repeatedly guess the password by trying several combinations until the password original password is discovered. If you are in search of password cracking tools, then you are at the right place. Here we have listed some best password cracker tools.

List Of Best Password Cracking Tools

1. Brutus

Availability: Windows10

Brutus is the fastest, free and flexible remote password cracking tool available for Windows 10. The current release of Brutus version AET2 contains authentication types such as HTTP (Basic Authentication), HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), POP3, FTP, SMB, Telnet, IMAP, NNTP, and a few more.

Brutus allows you to find open ports to crack a password of several protocols. You can also change the vulnerable wifi router password without the authentication of the owner. It has the best error handling. Capabilities. This tool can resume the cracking procedure even after a crash.

Features of Brutus:

  • Able to crack up to 60 targets at the same time;
  • Pause and Resume supported;
  • Support socks5 proxy ;
  • HTML Form interpretation;
  • Choose No username, single username, and multiple username modes;
  • Best error handling;
  • Configurable Bruteforce modes.

2. Hashcat

Availability: Windows, Linux, OS X

Hashcat is one of the best password cracking tools available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Everyone knows that passwords are not stored in plain text. Passwords are encrypted using a one-way function called a hash. Hashcat can be used to recover your password from the particular hash. 

Some popular hashing algorithms that Hashcat supports are LM hashes, MD4, MD5, SHA-family, and Unix Crypt. Hashcat can perform multiple types of attacks like a dictionary, mask, Hybrid, and combinator attack. Hashcat is the world's fastest password cracker.

Features of Hashcat:

  • Open source;
  • Supports pause and resume;
  • Multi-platform and multi-OS;
  • Support sessions and restore;
  • Supports hex-salt and hex-charset;
  • Can crack 300+ Hash types.

3. Wfuzz

Availability: On all OS that runs Python

Wfuzz is a web application password cracker tool created in Python language. It allows you to perform complex brute-force attacks on several web applications. Wfuzz can attack parameters, authentication, forms, directories, files, headers files, and more.

Moreover, it offers multiple Injection points abilities with recursion with various dictionaries. It also lets you set several encoders for each of your payloads.

Features of Wfuzz:

  • POST and GET parameter brute-forcing;
  • NTLM, Digest, Basic Authentication support;
  • Proxy support;
  • Cookie fuzzing and multi-threading;
  • Recursion while doing directory brute force;
  • Several encodings.

4. John the Ripper

Availability: Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android

John the Ripper is a cross-platform free password cracking tool. It is designed to test password strength, brute-force encrypted (hashed) passwords, and crack passwords via dictionary attacks. This tool is used by sysadmins in several enterprises to detect weak passwords that could put security at risk.

You can use a dictionary attack, brute-force attack, and rainbow tables to crack the password via this tool. It combines several password crackers into one package. It can detect the password hash types automatically. This tool can also be used to crack zip and pdf file passwords.

Features of John the Ripper:

  • A lot of password crackers in one program;
  • Automatic detect passwords hash;
  • Kerberos Andrew File System (Kerberos AFS) hash;
  • Hash of type Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM;
  • It allows you to customize the cracker.

5. THC Hydra

Availability: Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, QNX (Blackberry 10), and macOS

THC Hydra is well-known password cracking software that supports numerous protocols to attack. It helps system admins to check the weakness of the system. Hydra is the fastest and flexible network login cracker. Hydra is updated from time to time to support more services. You can easily find Hydra on Github.

It supports several protocols like FTP, HTTP(S)-FORM-GET, HTTP(S)-FORM-POST, HTTP(S)-GET, HTTP(S)-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, and more. Hydra can be compiled on Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, QNX (Blackberry 10), and macOS. Hydra comes preinstalled in major Linux distributions.

Features of THC Hydra:

  • Super fast and flexible;
  • Support numerous network protocols;
  • Can perform an SSL connect;
  • You can load several logins from a file;
  • Restore a previous aborted/crashed session.

6. RainbowCrack

Availability: Windows and Linux

RainbowCrack is a computer program that generates rainbow tables. Generated tables can be used in password cracking. RainbowCrack differs from other crackers as it uses large pre-computed rainbow tables to crack the password. This process reduces the time to crack a password. In simple words, It cracks hashes with rainbow tables.

RainbowCrack was developed by Zhu Shuanglei. RainbowCrack uses a time-memory tradeoff algorithm to crack hashes. Hashes stored in the table can be cracked faster as compared to a brute force cracker.

Features of Rainbow Crack

  • Support Rainbow table of any hash algorithm;
  • GPU acceleration with AMD & NVIDIA GPUs;
  • Rainbow table generation;
  • Rainbow table of customizable charset;
  • Available for Windows and Linux.

7. Medusa

Availability: Linux

Medusa is one of the fastest login brute force tools. It allows you to brute force credentials in many protocols that may lead to remote code execution. It supports 21 protocols including FTP, HTTP, IMAP, MS-SQL, MySQL, NCP (NetWare), PCAnywhere, POP3, PostgreSQL, SMB, SMTP, SNMP, SSHv2, SVN, Telnet, and more.

It is a powerful and lightweight tool. Medusa is designed to have almost the same feature as Hydra. Some major Linux distros like Kali Linux come with pre-installed Medusa.

Features of Medusa:

  • Thread-based parallel testing;
  • Flexible user input;
  • Modular design;
  • Supports multiple protocols;
  • Stop on success;
  • Verbose mode;
  • Pause Resume supported;
  • Good error handling.

8. Aircrack-ng

Availability: Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, OpenBSD, and Windows.

Aircrack-ng is a whole set of tools to access WiFi network security. It is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured. It is all in one packet sniffer, WEP, WPA/WPA2 cracker, analyzing tool, and hash capturing tool.

In simple words, it is used for Wi-Fi hacking. It works with any wireless network interface controller whose driver supports raw monitoring mode and can sniff 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g traffic. This tool comes preinstalled in Kali Linux.

Features of Aircrack-ng

  • Cracks WEP keys;
  • Decrypts WEP or WPA encrypted capture files with known key;
  • Packet sniffer and injector;
  • Removes WEP cloaking from PCAP files;
  • Allows accessing the wireless card from other computers.

9. Cain & Able

Availability: Windows

Cain & of Abel is a password recovery tool for Windows operating systems. It allows you to recover login passwords, general passwords, Screen saver passwords, dial-up passwords, and any other passwords cached on your system or external.PWL and registry files. With Cain & Abel, these passwords can also be changed quickly. There is a function of spoofing IP and MAC addresses. Can use the arp cache poisoning technique.

The Cain & Abel program is designed to crack passwords in vulnerable situations. The program is capable of detecting passwords by "asterisks" and also includes a network protocol analyzer.

Features of Cain & Able

  • Speeding up packet capture speed by wireless packet injection;
  • WEP cracking;
  • Decoding scrambled password;
  • Can record VoIP conversations;
  • And many more.

10. Ophcrack

Ophcrack is a free open-source Windows login password cracking tool. It can crack windows login by using rainbow tables. It comes with a Graphical User Interface and runs on multiple platforms. This tool can import hashes from a variety of formats.

It also can dump hashes of SAM files of windows. Ophcrack is the best password cracking tool for users who want to crack their windows login. This tool can crack windows login within minutes. However, Complicated passwords are hard to break.

Features of Ophcrack

  • Runs on all major platforms;
  • Cracks LM and NTLM hashes;
  • Free and Open-source software;
  • Audit mode;
  • CSV export;
  • Shows you real-time graphs to analyze the passwords.

Conclusion

So above are some of the best password cracking tools. These tools are used by many cybersecurity experts to check the security of their own network and database. However, some people use these tools to gain unauthorized access to the system. Feel free to mention your favorite password cracker tool in the comment section.

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