Passwords are the most widely used authentication system. To log in to a website, or to any computer, it is necessary to enter this password, together with the user, to have access. For security, and to prevent anyone from being able to get hold of the passwords, they are stored encrypted with a hash. However, no matter how carefully we take care of passwords, there are always weak points that can be used to steal them. And the Cain & Abel tool is one of the best in this regard.
Cain & Abel was originally born as password recovery software for Windows. Although, as with everything, it depends on the use we give it. This program is an expert in searching for passwords in any system and, if they are encrypted, being able to decrypt them to obtain the real key that is hidden behind the hash.
We must bear in mind that just as it happens with certain programs that do not have a very good reputation, the truth is that they are totally legal. This is something that, for example, has been happening for years with the popular P2P clients. These are used to download Torrent files of all kinds, but of course depending on the use made by the user himself; these contents will be legal or not so much. However, the program as such that acts as a client is totally lawful and legal.
Something similar happens with a program that acts as a multimedia center and that have not stopped growing over the years, we refer to Kodi. The controversy that has been generated over the years about this application is due to the add-ons or complements that it supports. Some of them are totally illegal because they give free access to paid content. But equally many of these are legal and commonly used, so once again it is the user who breaks the law, not the program as such.
Main features of Cain & Abel
This program is capable of scanning an entire computer to find all the passwords that are stored on it. But it is not the only thing that this software can do. This program can also be used to crack passwords using rainbow tables or brute force techniques. In addition, it is compatible with password dictionaries that will allow us to reverse engineer any password if it is one of the most used or probable ones.
In addition to searching for passwords on any computer, this program also has networking capabilities. With it we will be able to spy on any network and capture all the passwords that are sent through it, both encrypted and unencrypted. It can even be used to carry out brute force attacks on web pages and servers through a large number of protocols, such as VoIP.
In this way, as we can see, the utility that we can give to the application itself is very varied. It is sometimes used illegally to extract confidential information from third-party computers, but that depends on the user, not on the application. How could it be otherwise, from here we recommend you use the program for your own purposes and within the law, otherwise we could get into serious trouble.
Lastly, it is also important to point out that this program takes advantage of vulnerabilities and weaknesses to be able to reveal password boxes, see all the ones that have been saved in a cache (for example, in the browser) and analyze all kinds of protocols.
Other of the most relevant features that we can highlight of this software are:
- It allows to find out the WEB passwords of the Wi-Fi routers.
- It uses packet injection techniques to speed up the capture of packets on a network.
- Allows you to record VoIP conversations.
- Crack all kinds of strong passwords.
- It can compute hashes very fast to improve password cracking speed.
- It uses ARP Spoofing techniques to capture network traffic.
- Get the MAC address of any IP.
- Calculate a precise route from our PC to any destination.
- It reads without problems the content of the Windows PWL password files.
Furthermore, it is capable of hacking the passwords of the following protocols:
- LM and NTLM
- NTLMv2
- Cisco IOS-MD5
- Cisco PIX-MD5
- APOP-MD5
- CRAM-MD5 MD5
- OSPF–MD5
- RIPv2 MD5
- VRRP–HMAC
- VNC Triple DES
- MD2
- MD4
- MD5
- SHA-1
- SHA-2
- RIPEMD-160
- Kerberos 5
- RADIUS shared key hashes
- IKE PSK
- MSSQL
- mysql
- Hashes of Oracle and SIP Databases
