How to reveal a password hidden by asterisks

Download:AsteriskLogger

I just got a new computer and was re-installing all of my apps like FileZilla and WinSCP, etc, which are used to connect via FTP to some of my web sites. However, I could not remember my FTP passwords for the life of me and I didn’t have to because they were all nicely saved in the the FTP programs!

Unfortunately, the passwords were all hidden by asterisks and there was no way for me to transfer the passwords to the new computer. Then I found out that there is a way to reveal passwords that hidden by asterisks easily using a program from NirSoft.

These guys are great because they have already written several cool programs that I have written about before like ProduKey, which can be used to view the product keys for Office, etc, and Mail PassView, which can be used to recover passwords for Outlook, Eudora and Thunderbird, and MessenPass, which can be used to recoverr passwords for IM programs like MSN Messenger, Google Talk and AIM.

AsteriskLogger is another fabulous program from them that will reveal any password from a program that uses asterisks automatically.

This program has some nice features that make it better than any other password revealer:

• No need to press a button to reveal a password. Simply open the program or window that has the asterisks and the password will be revealed inside the password box itself!
• In the main window, Asterisk Logger will display more information about the revealed password such as the date and time the password was revealed, the name of the application, and the executable file .
• You can save the passwords to an HTML file or to a text file also.

It works on Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. It even works on Windows NT, but you have to download some file called psapi.dll and put it in your System32 directory. Even without the file, you can still reveal passwords, it just won’t show additional info.

There are some places where you will not be able to see passwords because they don’t store the passwords behind the asterisks for extra security, including Netscape 6.X, dialup and network passwords in Windows, and Windows usermanagement tools. It will also not work for passwords stored in Internet Explorer.

Overall, it worked wonderfully for me since my FTP programs stored the passwords behind the asterisks and I was able to recover all of my FTP passwords. It’s also useful if you have VNC programs and for some email programs like Outlook Express and IncrediMail. Enjoy!