There are
number of methods out their used by hackers to hack your account or get
your personal information. Today in this post i will share with you
guys 6 Most commonly used method to crack password and their
countermeasures. You must check out this article to be safe and to
prevent your online accounts from hacking.
Any password can be cracked using Brute-force attack. Brute-force
attacks try every possible combinations of numbers, letters and special
characters until the right password is match. Brute-force attacks can
take very long time depending upon the complexity of the password. The
cracking time is determined by the speed of computer and complexity of the password.
Countermeasure: Use long and complex passwords. Try to use combination
of upper and lowercase letters along with numbers. Brute-force attack
will take hundreds or even thousands of years to crack such complex and
long passwords.
Social engineering is process of manipulating someone to trust you and
get information from them. For example, if the hacker was trying to get
the password of a co-workers or friends computer, he could call him
pretending to be from the IT department and simply ask for his login
details. Sometime hackers call the victim pretending to be from bank and
ask for their credit cards details. Social Engineering can be used to
get someone password, to get bank credentials or any personal
information.
Countermeasure: If someone tries to get your personal or bank details
ask them few questions. Make sure the person calling you is legit. Never
ever give your credit card details on phone.
In keylogging or RATing the hacker sends keylogger or rat to the victim.
This allows hacker to monitor every thing victim do on his computer.
Every keystroke is logged including passwords. Moreever hacker can even
control the victims computer.
Countermeasure: Never login to your bank account from cyber cafe or
someone else computer. If its important use on-screen or virtual
keyboard while tying the login. Use latest anti-virus software and keep them updated.
Phishing
is the most easiest and popular hacking method used by hackers to get
someone account details. In Phishing attack hacker send fake page of
real website like facebook, gmail to victim. When someone login through
that fake page his details is send to the hacker. This fake pages can be
easily created and hosted on free web-hosting sites.
Countermeasure: Phishing attacks are very easy to avoid. The url of this
phishing pages are different from the real one. For example URL of
phishing page of facebook might look like facbbook.com (As you can see
There are two "b"). Always make sure that websites url is correct.
A Rainbow table is a huge pre-computed list of hashes for every possible
combination of characters. A password hash is a password that has gone
through a mathematical algorithm such as md5 and is transformed into
something which is not recognizable. A hash is a one way encryption so
once a password is hashed there is no way to get the original string
from the hashed string. A very commonly used hashing algorithm to store
passwords in website databases is MD5. It is almost similar to
dictionary attack, the only difference is, in rainbow tables attack
hashed characters are used as passwords whereas in dictionary attack
normal characters are used as passwords.
Example: ‘hello’ in md5 is 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592 and zero length string ("") is d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Countermeasure: Make sure you choose password that is long and complex.
Creating tables for long and complex password takes a very long time and
a lot of resources
This seems silly but this can easily help you
to get someones password within seconds. If hacker knows you, he can
use information he knows about you to guess your password. Hacker can
also use combination of Social Engineering and Guessing to acquire your
password.
Countermeasure: Don't use your name, surname, phone number or birthdate
as your password. Try to avoid creating password that relates to you.
Create complex and long password with combination of letters and numbers.
