Hack Windows Screen Saver Password

This is an interesting hack and not many people know about it.This requires no canned hacking tool, we will crack the password manually!!! First of all, why do we need to crack the Windows Screen Saver? How does it restrict us? If a Screen Saver is password protected, then whenever it is turned on, then in order to turn it off, you need to enter a password.It does not allow us to do anything on a system until and unless we enter the password. We will keep seeing the screen saver until we authenticate ourselves by entering the password.No not even CTRL+ALT+DEL works in this case. Windows stores the Screen Saver password in the user.dat file in the Windows directory.


If you have multiple profiles on your system then it is stored in the user.dat file in the c:\windows\profiles\username directory.(On Win 3x systems it is stored in the control.ini file The user.dat file constitues the registry of the Windows system, thus we can say that the Windows Screen Saver Password is stored in the registry.First of all, you need to change the attributes of this file and make it editable by right clicking on it and unselecting the Read Only Option else you will not be able to edit it.Once this is done, open this file in WordPad (Any text editor will do except MS WORD And Notepad.)Now look for the string: ScreenSave_Data You will find an even number of characters after Data, this is the Screen Saver Password encrypted and stored in the hex system.Each pair or hex values represent a single ASCII plaintext character.This means that if there are 10 hex values then the password is of 5 characters, each pair of Hex values standing for a single plaintext ASCII character.So in order to get the Plaintext password you just need to decrypt these hex values into ASCII.

Cracking Password

Hello friends in the last post i gave you some knowledge about the passwords and in this post I am going to tell you some ways with the help of which you can easily crack password and became a password cracker.But all of this requires patience.

The most common method of password cracking is password guessing, although it requires a lot of luck, it can be successful sometimes.To start to guess the password, you first need to gather all kinds of info about the victim.(See the Guidelines of keeping a password for more details.)The most common and the most successful method of password cracking is the use of password crackers.Now what exactly are password crackers? Now to understand what a password cracker is and how it works, you first need to understand how a person is authenticated.

When you are creating a new account or registering or running the setup(basically whenever you create a new account by entering the Username and Password.) you might be asked for the Username and Password.The username is mostly stored in plain text, but the password that you enter is stored in an encrypted form.Now when you enter the password, it is passed through a predefined algorithm and is thus encrypted and is stored on the hard disk.

So next time when you use the account and enter the password, the text (password) you type is passed through the same algorithm and is compared with the earlier stored value.If they both match, the user is authenticated else the authentication fails.The algorithm that is used to encrypt the password is a one way algorithm, by that I mean that if we pass the encrypted password through the reverse algorithm, we will not get the original plain text password.

Lets take an example to make it more clear: Say your plain text password is xyz123 and it is passed through an algorithm and stored in the a file as 0101027AF. Now if you get his encrypted password and know the algorithm which xyz123 is passed through to get 0101027AF, you cannot reverse the algorithm to get xyz123 from 0101027AF.

When you are typing in your password, the computer does not display it in plaintext but instead shows only stars i.e. ******** so that if someone is shoulder surfing, he cannot find out the password.The text box has been programmed in such a way.On most forms Unix you will not even see the asterisk marks and the cursor will not move, so that neither does a person shoulder surfing, find out the password nor does he find out the length of the password.

Password Crackers are of two types-: Brute Force and Dictionary Based.

Dictionary Based password Crackers try out all passwords from a given pre defined dictionary list to crack a password.These are faster but more often than not are unsuccessful and do not return the password.As they do not try out all combinations of possible keys, they are unable to crack those passwords which have symbols or numbers in between.

Brute Force Password Crackers try out all combinations of all keys which can be found in the keyboard (i.e. Symbols, Numbers, Alphabets) both Lower Case and Upper Case.These kinds of Password Crackers have a greater success rate but take a long time to crack the password.As they take all possible keys into consideration, they are more effective.Now that you know the two main types of password crackers lets see how they work.As passwords are encrypted by a one way algorithm, password crackers do not extract the password from the file but instead take the combination of letters, encrypt them by passing the characters through the original algorithm and compare this value with the stored encrypted value.If these two match, then the password cracker displays the password in plain text.

Introduction to Password

First of all, what exactly is a password.A password is best described as a verification or an authentication tool or object. Passwords are used to ensure legal and proper access to only those people who have the authority or the permission to view the data.A password is required in many places,you are required a password, to access your Inbox, you are required a password to dial up to your Internet Service Provider and in some organisations you also need to enter a password to start the system.At all places the Username and Password pair is used to authenticate the user.Usernames are used to identify the user and the password is used to authenticate the user and for every unique username there is a unique password.Take the example of the Lock and Key, for every lock you need a unique key to open it and enter.Here the Lock acts as the Username and the password would be the key.So passwords are as important as the key of your house.

Your house remains safe as long as only you who is the rightful owner has the key and no one else finds it.Similiarly, the concept behind passwords is that it is only the rightful owner who knows the password and no one else knows it.Everyday we hear about password stealing,computer break ins etc.Sometimes the user chooses very lame passwords which are easily guessed by hackers.There are certain guidelines which I would like to tell you which you must keep in mind while choosing a password:

1. Never keep your password same as your Username
2. Never choose your own name, Date of Birth, spouse's name, pet's name, child's name etc as your password, those are the first ones which are tried by a hacker.
3. Some people are so lazy that they keep their password to be 'Enter' (Carriage return).
4. Try to choose a word which is not in the dictionary and contains both numbers and alphabets,and if possible use both Lower Case and Upper Case alphabets and also symbols like
(#,$,%,^ etc) as they can be cracked only be brute force password crackers which take too long a time to crack.
You may say that choosing of weak passwords is responsible for the large number of hacks, but people themselves are the weakest chain in the whole authentication process.Most people usually use lame passwords like those I mentioned above, and those who use excellent passwords are not able to remember them and then write the password down on a piece of paper and stick it on their monitor.One should try his level best to remember weird passwords if he wants to keep his system secure.The best places where you can find the passwords, would be beneath the keyboard, behind the CPU or even on the sides of the monitor.Some people have trouble remembering the large number of passwords that they are asked for,while using various services, as a result they use the same password everywhere.Thus knowing even a single password might help in some cases.