How to hack Windows Password

In this practical scenario, we are going to crack Windows account with a simple password. Windows uses NTLM hashes to encrypt passwords. We will use the NTLM cracker tool in Cain and Abel to do that.

Cain and Abel cracker can be used to crack passwords using;

Dictionary attack

Brute force

Cryptanalysis

We will use the dictionary attack in this example. You will need to download the dictionary attack wordlist here 10k-Most-Common.zip

For this demonstration, we have created an account called Accounts with the password qwerty on Windows 7.

Password cracking steps

Open Cain and Abel, you will get the following main screen

Make sure the cracker tab is selected as shown above

Click on the Add button on the toolbar.

The following dialog window will appear

The local user accounts will be displayed as follows. Note the results shown will be of the user accounts on your local machine.

Right click on the account you want to crack. For this tutorial, we will use Accounts as the user account.

The following screen will appear

Right click on the dictionary section and select Add to list menu as shown above

Browse to the 10k most common.txt file that you just downloaded

Click on start button

If the user used a simple password like qwerty, then you should be able to get the following results.

Note: the time taken to crack the password depends on the password strength, complexity and processing power of your machine.

If the password is not cracked using a dictionary attack, you can try brute force or cryptanalysis attacks.