Need to Spy on a Cell Phone?
Here’s a Complete Guide to Spy on Calls,SMS, Contacts & More…

With the advancement in the technology, cell phones have just turned themselves into powerful mini-computers. While some people use cell phones to exchange secret messages and maintain illicit relationships, many children also misuse cell phones for storing and watching inappropriate content. Therefore, in order to investigate the truth it becomes inevitable for people to spy on cell phones of their loved ones or children.

What’s the Best Software to Spy on Cell Phone?

To spy on cell phones, there exists hundreds of spy programs on the market where a majority of them are nothing more than a crap. However, there are a few genuine spy programs as well and mSpy is one among them. After testing a handful of popular cell phone spy programs, I conclude mSpy as the clear winner and best among all.

mSpy is one of the best and most popular software out there to spy on cell phones. It offers an effective means to monitor the target cell phone and record activities like phone calls, text messages, GPS location, emails, web activities and much more. All the monitoring/recording process takes place in a complete stealth mode, so that the target user never gets to know that he/she is under surveillance. mSpy has every feature that a true spy software should have. This makes it a complete cell phone spying kit.

 

 

mSpy Features:

Here is a list of mobile spying features that you get with mSpy:

Phone Call Logs – Each incoming and outgoing number on the target cell phone is logged along with duration and time stamp.SMS Logging – Records both incoming and outgoing SMS.Phone Book Access – Gain access to all the contacts that is stored on the target cell phone.Record Web Activity – The program records all web activities including emails, websites visited, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and more.GPS Location Tracking – Track the exact location of the cell phone user at any given time.Cell ID Tracking: – With this option, it is possible to track the cell phone’s location during the absence of GPS.SMS Commands – Remotely send SMS commands to lock/unlock the cell phone usage or delete call history, SMS logs, photos and videos from the target phone at any time.Remote Device Lock or Wipe – You can remotely lock the target cell phone or wipe all its data at anytime you wish.Keylogging – Records keystrokes typed which includes passwords and other sensitive infrmation.Stealth Operation – Operates in a covert mode so that the presence of the spy software remains unnoticed.No Jail-Break Required – Unlike most other spy programs, mSpy can operate successfully without the need to jail-break the cell phones.

If you are a parent, mSpy can offer you an additional help as it supports a handful of control features as well:

Application Blocking – You have the option to block certain applications from being accessed on the target cell phone.Incoming Call Blocking – Block unwanted incoming calls on the target cell phone.Remote Lock – Remotely lock the cell phone or restrict its usage.Remote Delete – Remotely delete unwanted contacts, call logs, SMS and photos from the target cell phone.

How mSpy Works?

After your purchase, you can directly download mSpy onto the target cell phone. Installation process takes only a few minutes (2-3 min approx).

After the installation, each activity on the target cell phone is recorded and uploaded to the mSpy servers. You can login to your mSpy online account from your PC (or any computer in the world) to spy on the logs at any time. The logs contain Text messages, Contacts List, Call History, GPS Locations and many other information as mentioned above.

Compatible Cell Phones:

mSpy is compatible with most types of cell phones currently available in the market including:

Android PhonesBlackberryWindows MobileiPhoneiPod and Tablets

You can download mSpy from the following link:

Download mSpy – Android, iOS, BlackBerry & Windows Mobile

We will start with the basic principles of password cracking that are essential to ALL password cracking techniques, followed by some of the tools and technologies used. Then, one by one, I will show you how to use those principles and technologies effectively to crack or capture the various types of passwords out there.

The Importance & Methods of Password Cracking

Passwords are the most widely used form of authentication throughout the world. A username and password are used on computer systems, bank accounts, ATMs, and more. The ability to crack passwords is an essential skill to both the hacker and the forensic investigator, the latter needing to hack passwords for accessing the suspect's system, hard drive, email account, etc.

Although some passwords are very easy to crack, some are very difficult. In those cases, the hacker or forensic investigator can either employ greater computing resources (a botnet, supercomputer, GPU, ASIC, etc.), or they can look to obtain the password in other ways.

These ways might include insecure storage. In addition, sometimes you don't need a password to access password-protected resources. For instance, if you can replay a cookie, session ID, a Kerberos ticket, an authenticated session, or other resource that authenticates the user after the password authentication process, you can access the password protected resource without ever knowing the password.

Sometimes these attacks can be much easier than cracking a complex and long password. I will do a tutorial on various replay attacks in the near future (look out specifically for my upcoming article on stealing the Facebook cookie to access someone's Facebook account).

Now, let's start with the basics.

Step 1: Password Storage

In general, passwords are not stored in clear text. As a rule, passwords are stored as hashes. Hashes are one-way encryption that are unique for a given input. These systems very often use MD5 or SHA1 to hash the passwords.

In the Windows operating system, passwords on the local system are stored in the SAM file, while Linux stores them in the /etc/shadow file. These files are accessible only by someone with root/sysadmin privileges. In both cases, you can use a service or file that has root/sysadmin privileges to grab the password file (e.g. DLL injection with samdump.dll in Windows).

Step 2: Types of Attacks

Dictionary

A dictionary attack is the simplest and fastest password cracking attack. To put it simply, it just runs through a dictionary of words trying each one of them to see if they work. Although such an approach would seem impractical to do manually, computers can do this very fast and run through millions of words in a few hours. This should usually be your first approach to attacking any password, and in some cases, it can prove successful in mere minutes.

Rainbow Table

Most modern systems now store passwords in a hash. This means that even if you can get to the area or file that stores the password, what you get is an encrypted password. One approach to cracking this encryption is to take dictionary file and hash each word and compare it to the hashed password. This is very time- and CPU-intensive. A faster approach is to take a table with all the words in the dictionary already hashed and compare the hash from the password file to your list of hashes. If there is a match, you now know the password.

Brute Force

Brute force is the most time consuming approach to password cracking. It should always be your last resort. Brute force password cracking attempts all possibilities of all the letters, number, special characters that might be combined for a password and attempts them. As you might expect, the more computing horsepower you have, the more successful you will be with this approach.

Hybrid

A hybrid password attack is one that uses a combination of dictionary words with special characters, numbers, etc. Often these hybrid attacks use a combination of dictionary words with numbers appending and prepending them, and replacing letters with numbers and special characters. For instance, a dictionary attack would look for the word "password", but a hybrid attack might look for "p@$$w0rd123".

Step 3: Commonly Used Passwords

As much as we think each of us is unique, we do show some common patterns of behavior within our species. One of those patterns is the words we choose for passwords. There are number of wordlists that have been compiled of common passwords. In recent years, many systems have been cracked and passwords captured from millions of users. By using these already captured passwords, you are likely to find at least a few on the network you are trying to hack.

Step 4: Password Cracking Strategy

Many newbies, when they start cracking passwords, simply choose a tool and word list and then turn them loose. They are often disappointed with the results. Expert password crackers have a strategy. They don't expect to be able to crack every password, but with a well-developed strategy, they can crack most passwords in a very short amount of time.

The key to develop a successful strategy of password cracking is to use multiple iterations, going after the easiest passwords with the first iteration to the most difficult passwords using different techniques for each iteration.

Step 5: Password Cracking Software

John

John the Ripper is probably the world's best known password cracking tool. It is strictly command line and strictly for Linux. Its lack of a GUI makes a bit more challenging to use, but it is also why it is such a fast password cracker.

One of the beauties of this tool is its built in default password cracking strategy. First, attempts a dictionary attack and if that fails, it then attempts to use combined dictionary words, then tries a hybrid attack of dictionary words with special characters and numbers and only if all those fail will it resort to a brute force.

Ophcrack

Ophcrack is a free rainbow table-based password cracking tool for Windows. It is among the most popular Windows password cracking tools (Cain and Abel is probably the most popular; see below), but can also be used on Linux and Mac systems.

Image by Ysangkok/Wikimedia Commons

It cracks LM and NTLM (Windows) hashes. For cracking Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, you can download free rainbow tables. You can download Ophcrack on SourceForge, and you can get some free and premium rainbow tables for Ophcrack here.

L0phtCrack

L0phtCrack is an alternative to Ophcrack, and attempts to crack Windows passwords from hashes in the SAM file or the Active Directory (AD). It also uses dictionary and brute force attacks for generating and guessing passwords.

Image via L0phtCrack

L0phtCrack was acquired by Symantec and they promptly discontinued it in 2006. Later, L0phtCrack developers re-acquired this excellent password cracking tool and re-released it in 2009. You can download the tool here.

Cain and Abel

Cain and Abel just might be the best known password cracking tool on the planet. Written strictly for Windows, it can crack numerous hash types, including NTLM, NTLMv2, MD5, wireless, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, SHA1, SHA2, Cisco, VoIP, and many others.

Cain and Abel can crack passwords using a dictionary attack, rainbow attack, and brute force. One of its better features is the ability to select the password length and character set when attempting a brute force attack. And besides being an excellent password cracking tool, it is also a great ARP Poisoning and MiTM tool.

THC-Hydra

THC-Hydra is probably the most widely used online hacking tool. It is capable of cracking web form authentication, and when used in conjunction with other tools such as Tamper Data, it can be a powerful and effective tool for cracking nearly every type of online password authentication mechanism.

The initial help screen for Hydra.

Brutus

Brutus is an online password cracking tool that many consider the fastest online password cracker. It is free and available on both Linux and Windows, and it supports password cracking in HTTP (Basic Authentication), HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), POP3, FTP, SMB, Telnet, and other types such as IMAP, NNTP, NetBus, etc.

Brutus has not been updated in quite awhile, but it can still be useful and since it is open source, you can update it yourself. Brutus can be downloaded here.

Aircrack-Ng

In my humble opinion, aircrack-ng is undoubtedly the best all-around Wi-Fi hacking software available. It is capable of cracking both WEP and WPA2, and it is also capable of doing the following, among many other things.

Creating a Soft APCreating an Evil TwinCreating a Rogue APConducting a DOS attack against a Wi-Fi AP

It is only available for Linux and requires a bit of a learning curve to master, but you will be richly rewarded for the time spent learning it. In addition, to be most effective you will need to use an aircrack-ng compatible wireless card, so check their extensive list before buying your card. You can find more info on aircrack-ng over in my Wi-Fi hacking series.

Aircrack-ng is built into BackTrack and Kali and can be downloaded here.

Step 6: Password Cracking Hardware

Botnet

Password cracking is simply a function of brute force computing power. What one machine can do in one hour, two machines can do in a half hour. This same principle applies to using a network machines. Imagine what you can do if you could access a network of one million machines!

Some of the botnets available around the globe are more than a million machines strong and are available for rent to crack passwords. If you have a password that might take one year to crack with your single CPU, a million-machine botnet can cut that time to approximately 1 millionth the time, or 30 seconds!

GPU

GPUs, or graphical processing units, are much more powerful and faster than CPU for rendering graphics on your computer and for cracking passwords. We have a few tools built into Kali that are specially designed for using GPUs to crack passwords, namely cudahashcat, oclhashcat, and pyrit. Look for coming tutorials on using these tools and the GPU on your high-end video card to accelerate your password cracking.

ASIC

In recent years, some devices have been developed specifically for hardware cracking. These application-specific devices can crack passwords faster than over 100 CPUs working symmetrically.

[1] Bitfury boards by Black Arrow, [2] Butterfly Labs processor, [3] Inside the Butterfly Labs Monarch

Images via Bitcoin Talk, CoinDesk, Gizmodo

Black Arrow Software and Butterfly Labs, among others, are now selling these devices for prices up to $1500 per.

That concludes our beginning lesson on the basics of general password cracking. Stay tuned for more lessons as we go more in-depth with specific examples of using some of the tools and methods we have just covered above.

A password is the secret word or phrase that is used for the authentication process in various applications. It is used to gain access to accounts and resources. A password protects our accounts or resources from unauthorized access.

What is Password Cracking?

Password cracking is the process of guessing or recovering a password from stored locations or from data transmission system. It is used to get a password for unauthorized access or to recover a forgotten password. In penetration testing, it is used to check the security of an application.

In recent years, computer programmers have been trying to create algorithms for password cracking in less time. Most of the password cracking tools try to login with every possible combination of words. If login is successful, it means the password was found. If the password is strong enough with a combination of numbers, characters and special characters, this cracking method may take hours to weeks or months. A few password cracking tools use a dictionary that contains passwords. These tools are totally dependent on the dictionary, so success rate is lower.

In the past few years, programmers have developed many password cracking tools. Every tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. In this post, we are covering a few of the most popular password cracking tools.

1. Brutus

Brutus is one of the most popular remote online password cracking tools. It claims to be the fastest and most flexible password cracking tool. This tool is free and is only available for Windows systems. It was released back in October 2000.

It supports HTTP (Basic Authentication), HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), POP3, FTP, SMB, Telnet and other types such as IMAP, NNTP, NetBus, etc. You can also create your own authentication types. This tool also supports multi-stage authentication engines and is able to connect 60 simultaneous targets. It also has resume and load options. So, you can pause the attack process any time and then resume whenever you want to resume.

This tool has not been updated for many years. Still, it can be useful for you.

2. RainbowCrack

RainbowCrack is a hash cracker tool that uses a large-scale time-memory trade off process for faster password cracking than traditional brute force tools. Time-memory trade off is a computational process in which all plain text and hash pairs are calculated by using a selected hash algorithm. After computation, results are stored in the rainbow table. This process is very time consuming. But, once the table is ready, it can crack a password must faster than brute force tools.

You also do not need to generate rainbow tablets by yourselves. Developers of RainbowCrack have also generated LM rainbow tables, NTLM rainbow tables, MD5 rainbow tables and Sha1 rainbow tables. Like RainbowCrack, these tables are also available for free. You can download these tables and use for your password cracking processes.

Download Rainbow tables here:http://project-rainbowcrack.com/table.htm

A few paid rainbow tables are also available, which you can buy from here:http://project-rainbowcrack.com/buy.php

This tool is available for both Windows and Linux systems.

Download Rainbow crack here:http://project-rainbowcrack.com/

3. Wfuzz

Wfuzz is another web application password cracking tool that tries to crack passwords with brute forcing. It can also be used to find hidden resources like directories, servlets and scripts. This tool can also identify different kind of injections including SQL Injection, XSS Injection, LDAP Injection, etc in Web applications.

Key features of Wfuzz password cracking tool:

Capability of injection via multiple points with multiple dictionaryOutput in colored HTMLPost, headers and authentication data brute forcingProxy and SOCK Support, Multiple Proxy SupportMulti ThreadingBrute force HTTP PasswordPOST and GET Brute forcingTime delay between requestsCookies fuzzing

Download here:

DOWNLOAD

4. Cain and Abel

Cain and Abel is a well-known password cracking tool that is capable of handling a variety of tasks. The most notable thing is that the tool is only available for Windows platforms. It can work as sniffer in the network, cracking encrypted passwords using the dictionary attack, recording VoIP conversations, brute force attacks, cryptanalysis attacks, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords, decoding scrambled passwords, and analyzing routing protocols.

Cain and Abel does not exploit any vulnerability or bugs. It only covers security weakness of protocols to grab the password. This tool was developed for network administrators, security professionals, forensics staff, and penetration testers.

Download here: http://www.oxid.it/ca_um/

5. John the Ripper

John the Ripper is another well-known free open source password cracking tool for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. A Windows version is also available. This tool can detect weak passwords. A pro version of the tool is also available, which offers better features and native packages for target operating systems. You can also download Openwall GNU/*/Linux that comes with John the Ripper.

Download John the Ripper here:http://www.openwall.com/john/

6. THC Hydra

THC Hydra is a fast network logon password cracking tool. When it is compared with other similar tools, it shows why it is faster. New modules are easy to install in the tool. You can easily add modules and enhance the features. It is available for Windows, Linux, Free BSD, Solaris and OS X. This tool supports various network protocols. Currently it supports Asterisk, AFP, Cisco AAA, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, CVS, Firebird, FTP, HTTP-FORM-GET, HTTP-FORM-POST, HTTP-GET, HTTP-HEAD, HTTP-PROXY, HTTPS-FORM-GET, HTTPS-FORM-POST, HTTPS-GET, HTTPS-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, ICQ, IMAP, IRC, LDAP, MS-SQL, MYSQL, NCP, NNTP, Oracle Listener, Oracle SID, Oracle, PC-Anywhere, PCNFS, POP3, POSTGRES, RDP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rsh, SAP/R3, SIP, SMB, SMTP, SMTP Enum, SNMP, SOCKS5, SSH (v1 and v2), Subversion, Teamspeak (TS2), Telnet, VMware-Auth, VNC and XMPP.

Download THC Hydra here:https://www.thc.org/thc-hydra/

If you are a developer, you can also contribute to the tool’s development.

7. Medusa

Medusa is also a password cracking tool similar to THC Hydra. It claims to be a speedy parallel, modular and login brute forcing tool. It supports HTTP, FTP, CVS, AFP, IMAP, MS SQL, MYSQL, NCP, NNTP, POP3, PostgreSQL, pcAnywhere, rlogin, SMB, rsh, SMTP, SNMP, SSH, SVN, VNC, VmAuthd and Telnet. While cracking the password, host, username and password can be flexible input while performing the attack.

Medusa is a command line tool, so you need to learn commands before using the tool. Efficiency of the tool depends on network connectivity. On a local system, it can test 2000 passwords per minute.

With this tool, you can also perform a parallel attack. Suppose you want to crack passwords of a few email accounts simultaneously. You can specify the username list along with the password list.

Read more about this here:http://foofus.net/goons/jmk/medusa/medusa.html

Download Medusa here: http://www.foofus.net/jmk/tools/medusa-2.1.1.tar.gz

8. OphCrack

OphCrack is a free rainbow-table based password cracking tool for Windows. It is the most popular Windows password cracking tool, but can also be used on Linux and Mac systems. It cracks LM and NTLM hashes. For cracking Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, free rainbow-tables are also available.

A live CD of OphCrack is also available to simplify the cracking. One can use the Live CD of OphCrack to crack Windows-based passwords. This tool is available for free.

Download OphCrack here:http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/

Download free and premium rainbow tables for OphCrack here:http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/tables.php

9. L0phtCrack

L0phtCrack is an alternative to OphCrack. It attempts to crack Windows password from hashes. For cracking passwords, it uses Windows workstations, network servers, primary domain controllers, and Active Directory. It also uses dictionary and brute force attacking for generating and guessing passwords. It was acquired by Symantec and discontinued in 2006. Later L0pht developers again re-acquired it and launched L0phtCrack in 2009.

It also comes with a schedule routine audit feature. One can set daily, weekly or monthly audits, and it will start scanning on the scheduled time.

Download L0phtCrack:http://www.l0phtcrack.com/download.html

10. Aircrack-NG

Aircrack-NG is a WiFi password cracking tool that can crack WEP or WPA passwords. It analyzes wireless encrypted packets and then tries to crack passwords via its cracking algorithm. It uses the FMS attack along with other useful attack techniques for cracking password. It is available for Linux and Windows systems. A live CD of Aircrack is also available.

If you want to use AirCrack NG for password cracking, read tutorials here: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=getting_started

Download AirCrack-NG here: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/

How to create a password that is hard to crack

In this post, we have listed 10 password cracking tools. These tools try to crack passwords with different password cracking algorithms. Most of the password cracking tools are available for free. So, you should always try to have a strong password that is hard to crack by these password cracking tools. These are few tips you can try while creating a password.

The longer the password, the harder it is to crack: Password length is the most important factor. If you select a small password, password cracking tools can easily crack it by using few words combinations. A longer password will take a longer time in guessing. You’re your password at least 8 characters long.

Always use a combination of characters, numbers and special characters: This is another thing which makes passwords hard to crack. Password cracking tools try the combination of one by one. Have a combination of small characters, capital letters, and special characters. Suppose if you have only numbers in your password. Password cracking tools only need to guess numbers from 0-9. Here only length matters. But having a password combination of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and other special characters with a good length will make it harder to crack. This kind of password sometimes takes weeks to crack.

Variety in passwords: One important thing you must always take care. Never use same password everywhere. Cyber criminals can steal passwords from one website and then try it on other websites too.

In case you are not sure about the strength of your password, you can check it from variety of online tools available for free. Try this official Microsoft Tool for checking thepassword strength.

What to avoid while selecting your password

There are a few things which were very common a few years back and still exist. Most of the password cracking tools start from there. Passwords that fall into this category are most easy to crack. These are the few password mistakes which you should avoid:

Never use a dictionary wordAvoid using your pet’s name, parent name, your phone number, driver’s license number or anything which is easy to guess.Avoid using passwords with sequence or repeated characters: For Ex: 1111111, 12345678 or qwerty, asdfgh.

Avoid using passwords that fall in worst password list. Every year, data analysis companies publish the list of worst passwords of the year from analyzing the leaked password data.

The top 11 worst passwords of 2012:

password12345612345678abc123qwertymonkeyletmeindragon111111baseballiloveyou

The list for 2013 is yet to be published.

Conclusion:

Interested in learning more about password cracking? Check out our Ethical Hacking training! Fill out the form below to receive pricing details and a course syllabus.

ETHICAL HACKING TRAINING

The password is what makes your network, web accounts and email accounts safe from unauthorized access. These password cracking tools are proof that your passwords can be cracked easily if you are not selecting good passwords. In the article, we have listed every kind of password cracking tools, including web application password cracking tools, network password cracking tools, email password cracking tools, Windows password cracking tools and Wi-Fi password cracking tools. Security researchers use these tools to audit the security of their apps and check how to make their application secure against these tools. Cyber criminals also use these tools, but for wrong purposes. They use these password cracking tools to crack passwords of users and then access their data.

Now it is up to you. You can either use these tools for good work or bad. Although we never encourage using any educational information for any cyber crime. This post is only for educational purposes. If you are using any of these tools for cyber crimes, the author or website publishing the article will not be responsible. Learn things to know how you can be hacked and how to protect yourself.

 

 

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AUTHOR

Pavitra Shankdhar

Pavitra Shandkhdhar is an engineering graduate and a security researcher. His area of interest is web penetration testing. He likes to find vulnerabilities in websites and playing computer games in his free time. He is currently a researcher with InfoSec Institute.