Posts Tagged ‘Hacking’

Get Those Passwords

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Today, I had to setup an Oki C5650 on a network, and find out how many pages had passed through it due to an surprisingly quick turnaround in toner. I was struggling to find the default admin password for the web interface as it wasn’t in the online manual.

Knowling that searching the internet is much better than my library abilities, I managed to find the password at Art of Hacking. In true form, there’s a very useful page that has user collected default passwords for thousands of devices. And in true hacking form, it’s called etc/passwd.

Reverse Engineering Passwords

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Hashing passwords is a common way to secure them in a database and make sure that they cannot be read easily.

But did you know there’s a website that reverse engineers the hashes and stores them in a searchable database?

The folks over at RedNoize have created such a site.

Obviously, there’s no better protection than keeping your databases tightly secured - but even so, it may be worth considering putting extra abstraction on passwords - just to make it that little more difficult.