Th3 S3cr3t Ag3nt

Every year security companies are coming up with the “worst passwords” based on breached credentials found on in the murkier parts of the internet. Every year people seem surprised that “123456” is a terrible password and people are still using it. Passwords often get rated by how quickly the could be “cracked”. The length of time for cracking passwords in the real world varies wildly according the the context and the numbers are often confusing. NordPass recently published their list of most common passwords and claimed that the third most popular password was “picture1” and it would take 3 hours to crack. If that’s referring to offline password cracking then we should have a whip-round to upgrade the hackers hardware because a password like that should take seconds to crack. When hackers try to brute force their way into an account online they have to try lots of different password combinations until they get in, or just give up. This takes a lot of time so hackers spend time optimiz...

This is the story of a phishing email that came across my desk. It's good to take a look at what the bad guys are doing sometimes. It's often not rocket science but it's handy to keep an eye on the simple techniques used. And if this isn't your day job you probably don't get forwarded a huge number of phishing emails, malware to analyse or dodgy sites to investigate. In fact hopefully you do your best to avoid all of those things. The Attack Chain So this particular phishing campaign started as many others do with a simple phishing email. It's not an aggressive email, it's not selling itself too hard, no spelling mistakes, no funny looking URLs and it's pretty simple. There's only one link to click on. Just a quick note here about clicking on links in nefarious emails. Don't do it unless you are ready to. This link could trigger some malware, it could be unique to the targeted email (so the attacker knows the email address is valid...

When cracking passwords, efficiency is everything. You've spend hard earned money on GPUs, you may as well optimise your password lists to make sure that you don't waste time hashing passwords that are out of policy for your target organisation. So that's simple enough with a few grep and sed commands but after a while you start to feel lazy and script it. Thats why I've added  password policy script to my password munging script . Using the policy script is pretty straightforward: ./policy.py -luns passwords.txt -o passwordsinpolicy.txt The switches are as follows: -l --lowercase passwords must include lowercase letters -u --uppercase passwords must include uppercase letters -n --numeric password must include numbers -s --special passwords must include special characters All of the above are switched on by default. The input file must have each password on a separate line. There are also the following optional switches: -m --min minimu...