How To Crack Authentication Required Windstream

A brief note - this article is about the theory of how to crack passwords. Understanding how cybercriminals execute attacks is extremely important for understanding how to secure systems against those types of attacks.

1. In this tutorial, I am going to teach you how to crack a password-protected website. To perform the attack, we are going to use the Hydra password cracking u.
2. Speed Test- Kinetic by Windstream - Kinetic by Windstream's start experience including trending news, entertainment, sports, videos, personalized content, web searches, and much more.
3. This is just for learning.Softwares used:W32DasmHIEW32My New Tutorial Link - (Intro to Crackin using OLLYDBG)http://www.4shared.com/archive/xs5kjZBEce/Introd.
4. An authentication mechanism (or method) is a way for you to prove that you’re allowed to access something. Passwords have been the default method of authentication for as long as most of us have needed to prove to a computer that we’re allowed to access it. However, passwords are not the only authentication mechanism. Authentication Methods.

With the right tools, you can examine the inner workings of a program and look at how the copy protection works. Using assembly language, you can even change these programs so that they never have to be registered or purchased. Doing so requires you to crack the software by modifying DLL files.

Attempting to hack a system you do not own is likely illegal in your jurisdiction (plus hacking your own systems may [and often does] violate any warranty for that product).

Let's start with the basics. What is a brute force attack?

How To Crack Authentication Required Windstream Password

This type of attack involves repeatedly trying to login as a user by trying every possible letter, number, and character combination (using automated tools).

This can be done either online (so in real-time, by continually trying different username/password combinations on accounts like social media or banking sites) or offline (for example if you've obtained a set of hashed passwords and are trying to crack them offline).

Offline isn't always possible (it can be difficult to obtain a set of hashed passwords), but it is much less noisy. This is because a security team will probably notice many, many failed login accounts from the same account, but if you can crack the password offline, you won't have a record of failed login attempts.

This is relatively easy with a short password. It becomes exponentially more difficult with a longer password because of the sheer number of possibilities.

For example, if you know that someone is using a 5 character long password, composed only of lowercase letters, the total number of possible passwords is 26^5 (26 possible letters to choose from for the first letter, 26 possible choices for the second letter, etc.), or 11,881,376 possible combinations.

But if someone is using an 11 character password, only of lowercase letters, the total number of possible passwords is 26 ^11, or 3,670,344,486,987,776 possible passwords.

When you add in uppercase letters, special characters, and numbers, this gets even more difficult and time consuming to crack. The more possible passwords there are, the harder it is for someone to successfully login with a brute force attack.

How to protect yourself

This type of attack can be defended against in a couple of different ways. First, you can use sufficiently long, complex passwords (at least 15 characters). You can also use unique passwords for each account (use a password manager!) to reduce the danger from data breaches.

A security team can lock out an account after a certain number of failed login attempts. They can also force a secondary method of verification like Captcha, or use 2 factor authentication (2FA) which requires a second code (SMS or email, app-based, or hardware key based).

Here's an article on how to execute a brute force attack.

How can you crack passwords faster?

A dictionary attack involves trying to repeatedly login by trying a number of combinations included in a precompiled 'dictionary', or list of combinations.

This is usually faster than a brute force attack because the combinations of letters and numbers have already been computed, saving you time and computing power.

But if the password is sufficiently complex (for example 1098324ukjbfnsdfsnej) and doesn't appear in the 'dictionary' (the precompiled list of combinations you're working from), the attack won't work.

It is frequently successful because, often when people choose passwords, they choose common words or variations on those words (for example, 'password' or 'p@SSword').

A hacker might also use this type of attack when they know or guess a part of the password (for example, a dog's name, children's birthdays, or an anniversary - information a hacker can find on social media pages or other open source resources).

Similar protection measures to those described above against brute force attacks can prevent these types of attacks from being successful.

What if you already have a list of hashed passwords?

Passwords are stored in the /etc/shadow file for Linux and C:WindowsSystem32config file for Windows (which are not available while the operating system is booted up).

If you've managed to get this file, or if you've obtained a password hash in a different way such as sniffing traffic on the network, you can try 'offline' password cracking.

Whereas the attacks above require trying repeatedly to login, if you have a list of hashed passwords, you can try cracking them on your machine, without setting off alerts generated by repeated failed login attempts. Then you only try logging in once, after you've successfully cracked the password (and therefore there's no failed login attempt).

You can use brute force attacks or dictionary attacks against the hash files, and may be successful depending on how strong the hash is.

Wait a minute - what's hashing?

35D4FFEF6EF231D998C6046764BB935D

Recognize this message? It says 'Hi my name is megan'

7DBDA24A2D10DAF98F23B95CFAF1D3AB

This one is the first paragraph of this article. Yes, it looks like nonsense, but it's actually a 'hash'.

A hash function allows a computer to input a string (some combination of letters, numbers, and symbols), take that string, mix it up, and output a fixed length string. That's why both strings above are of the same length, even though the strings' inputs were very different lengths.

Hashes can be created from nearly any digital content. Basically all digital content can be reduced to binary, or a series of 0s and 1s. Therefore, all digital content (images, documents, etc.) can be hashed.

There are many different hashing functions, some of which are more secure than others. The hashes above were generated with MD5 (MD stands for 'Message Digest'). Different functions also differ in the length of hash they produce.

The same content in the same hash function will always produce the same hash. However, even a small change will alter the hash entirely. For example,

How To Crack Authentication Required Windstream Account

2FF5E24F6735B7564CAE7020B41C80F1

Is the hash for 'Hi my name is Megan' Just capitalizing the M in Megan completely changed the hash from above.

Hashes are also one-way functions (meaning they can't be reversed). This means that hashes (unique and one-way) can be used as a type of digital fingerprint for content.

What's an example of how hashes are used?

Hashes can be used as verification that a message hasn't been changed.

When you send an email, for example, you can hash the entire email and send the hash as well. Then the recipient can run the received message through the same hash function to check if the message has been tampered with in transit. If the two hashes match, the message hasn’t been altered. If they don’t match, the message has been changed.

Also, passwords are usually hashed when they're stored. When a user enters their password, the computer computes the hash value and compares it to the stored hash value. This way the computer doesn’t store passwords in plaintext (so some nosy hacker can't steal them!).

If someone is able to steal the password file, the data is useless because the function can’t be reversed (though there are ways, like rainbow tables, to figure out what plaintext creates the known hash).

What's the problem with hashes?

If a hash can take data of any length or content, there are unlimited possibilities for data which can be hashed.

Since a hash converts this text into a fixed length content (for example, 32 characters), there are a finite number of combinations for a hash. It is a very very large number of possibilities, but not an infinite one.

Eventually two different sets of data will yield the same hash value. This is called a collision.

If you have one hash and you're trying to go through every single possible plaintext value to find the plaintext which matches your hash, it will be a very long, very difficult process.

However, what if you don't care which two hashes collide?

This is called the 'birthday problem' in mathematics. In a class of 23 students, the likelihood of someone having a birthday on a specific day is around 7%, but the probability that any two people share the same birthday is around 50%.

The same type of analysis can be applied to hash functions in order to find any two hashes which match (instead of a specific hash which matches the other).

To avoid this, you can use longer hash functions such as SHA3, where the possibility of collisions is lower.

You can try generating your own hash functions for SHA3 here and MD5 here.

You can try to brute force hashes, but it takes a very long time. The faster way to do that, is to use pre-computed rainbow tables (which are similar to dictionary attacks).

It seems really easy to get hacked. Should I be concerned?

The most important thing to remember about hacking is that no one wants to do more work than they have to do. For example, brute forcing hashes can be extremely time consuming and difficult. If there's an easier way to get your password, that's probably what a nefarious actor will try first.

That means that enabling basic cyber security best practices is probably the easiest way to prevent getting hacked. In fact, Microsoft recently reported that just enabling 2FA will end up blocking 99.9% of automated attacks.

Additional Reading:

TL;DR - An attacker can bypass Google's two-step login verification, reset a user's master password, and otherwise gain full account control, simply by capturing a user's application-specific password (ASP).

(With all due respect to Google's 'Good to Know' ad campaign)

Abusing Google's (not-so-) Application-Specific Passwords

Google’s 2-step verification makes for an interesting case study in some of the challenges that go with such a wide-scale, comprehensive deployment of strong authentication. To make 2-step verification usable for all of their customers (and to bootstrap it into their rather expansive ecosystem without breaking everything), Google’s engineers had to make a few compromises. In particular, with 2-step verification came a notion of “Application-Specific Passwords” (ASPs).

Some months ago, we found a way to (ab)use ASPs to gain full control over Google accounts, completely circumventing Google’s 2-step verification process. We communicated our findings to Google’s security team, and recently heard back from them that they had implemented some changes to mitigate the most serious of the threats we’d uncovered. Here’s what we found:

Application-Specific Passwords

Generally, once you turn on 2-step verification, Google asks you to create a separate Application-Specific Password for each application you use (hence “Application-Specific”) that doesn’t support logins using 2-step verification. Then you use that ASP in place of your actual password. In more-concrete terms, you create ASPs for most client applications that don’t use a web-based login: email clients using IMAP and SMTP (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc.); chat clients communicating over XMPP (Adium, Pidgin, etc.), and calendar applications that sync using CalDAV (iCal, etc.).

Even some of Google’s own software initially required you to use ASPs - e.g. to enable Chrome’s sync features, or to set up your Google account on an Android device. More recently, these clients have generally shifted to using methods along the lines of OAuth. In this model, when you first log in using a new application or device, you get an authorization prompt — including 2-step verification — in a webview; after a successful login, Google’s service returns a limited-access “token”, which is used to authenticate your device/application in the future.

Actually, OAuth-style tokens and ASPs are notionally very similar — in each case, you end up creating a unique authorization token for each different device/application you connect to your Google account. Further, each token can be individually revoked without affecting the others: if you lose your smartphone, you can make sure that it no longer has access to your GMail account without having to memorize a new password.

So then, the major differences between OAuth tokens and ASPs are:

• OAuth tokens are created automatically, while ASPs are a thoroughly manual affair. You have to log into Google’s account settings page to create one, and then transcribe (or copy/paste) it into your application.
• OAuth tokens use a flexible authorization model, and can be restricted to accessing only certain data or services in your account. By contrast, ASPs are — in terms of enforcement — not actually application-specific at all!

This second point deserves some more attention. If you create an ASP for use in (for example) an XMPP chat client, that same ASP can also be used to read your email over IMAP, or grab your calendar events with CalDAV. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. In fact, Eric Grosse and Mayank Upadhyay of Google even call this weakness out in their recent publication about Google's authentication infrastructure:

'Another weakness of ASP is the misimpression that is provides application-limited rather than full-scope account access.' - Authentication at Scale, appearing in IEEE S&P Magazine vol. 11, no. 1

As it turns out, ASPs can do much, much more than simply access your email over IMAP. In fact, an ASP can be used to log into almost any of Google’s web properties and access privileged account interfaces, in a way that bypasses 2-step verification!

Auto-Login with Chrome

In recent versions of Android (and ChromeOS), Google has included, in their browser, an “auto-login” mechanism for Google accounts. After you’ve linked your device to a Google account, the browser will let you use your device’s existing authorization to skip Google’s web-based sign-on prompts. (There is even experimental support for this in desktop versions of Chrome; you can enable it by visiting chrome://flags/.)

Until late last week, this auto-login mechanism worked even for the most sensitive parts of Google’s account-settings portal. This included the “Account recovery options” page, on which you can add or edit the email addresses and phone numbers to which Google might send password-reset messages. In short, if you can access the “Account recovery options” page for a Google account, then you can seize complete control of that account from its rightful owner.

So, to recap:

• You can use an ASP to link an Android device (or Chromebook, etc.) to a Google account, and
• With that linked device, you could (until very recently) access the account’s recovery options (using auto-login to bypass any sign-on pages), change the password-reset settings, and gain full control over the account.

This was enough for us to realize that ASPs presented some surprisingly-serious security threats, but we wanted to understand how the underlying mechanisms actually worked.

Want to learn more about two-factor authentication? Download our guide to evaluating two-factor authentication

Technical Details

On his excellent Android Explorations blog, Nikolay Elenkov documented a rather in-depth investigation into the web auto-login mechanism on Android. This was a great starting point but still left a few gaps for our purposes. We wanted to learn how to exploit Google’s auto-login mechanism without using an Android device (or Chromebook, etc.) at all.

To do this, we set up an an intercepting proxy with a custom CA certificate to watch the network traffic between an Android emulator instance and Google’s servers. When adding a Google account to the emulator (using an ASP), we saw the following request:

The response body contained, among other things:

While the URL and some of the parameters aren’t documented, this very closely resembles the Google ClientLogin API. To recreate this request on our own, we’d need only to figure out what values to fill in for the EncryptedPasswd and androidId parameters. It turns out that androidId is simple; we’re confident in assuming it is the same “Android ID” mentioned in the Android API Docs: a randomly-generated 64-bit value that is intended to uniquely identify an Android device.

Another of Elenkov’s blog posts led us to believe that EncryptedPasswd might be our ASP, encrypted with a 1024-bit RSA public key included in the Android system. EncryptedPasswd was, in fact, 130 bytes of (base64-encoded) binary data, so this seems quite possible. However, before digging too deeply into this, we decided to try replacing the EncryptedPasswd parameter with the (unencrypted) Passwd parameter from the ClientLogin API documentation, set to our ASP:

This worked! Again, we got a response containing what appeared to be a valid Token. The token created by the android.clients.google.com endpoint was now visible in our account's 'Connected Sites, Apps, and Services' interface, appearing to offer 'Full Account Access':

Continuing on with our captured traffic, we subsequently saw two different workflows for the browser’s auto-login functionality. The simpler of the two was another ClientLogin-style request, but using the returned Token:

This request returned a response body along the lines of:

From this request, we determined that the general format for the service parameter was weblogin:continue=url_encode(destination_url). We then decided to try specifying this service in our original request - i.e. with an ASP instead of the Token (and without trying to determine the provenance of an unknown client_sig parameter):

This returned us the same form of response:

That MergeSession URL is the key here. If you open it in an un-authenticated web browser after making this API call (you have to do this quickly; it has a very short expiration window), you will be immediately logged into your account settings page, with no authentication prompt!

So: given nothing but a username, an ASP, and a single request to https://android.clients.google.com/auth, we can log into any Google web property without any login prompt (or 2-step verification)!

Google’s Fix

As we mentioned before, this worked on even the most sensitive sections of Google’s account-settings portal. An attacker could perform a variety of privileged actions using a victim's ASP:

• An attacker could pass https://accounts.google.com/b/0/UpdateAccountRecoveryOptions?hl=en&service=oz as the destination URL in the API request, and the resulting MergeSession URL would take them immediately to the “Account recovery options” page, in which they could modify the password recovery email address to perform a reset of the victim's master password.
• Similarly, an attacker could pass https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthConfig?hl=en, and the resulting URL would take them to the settings for 2-step verification, in which they could create/edit ASPs, or turn off 2FA for the account altogether.

How To Crack Authentication Required Windstream Router

This is no longer the case as of February 21st, when Google engineers pushed a fix to close this loophole. As far as we can tell, Google is now maintaining some per-session state to identify how you authenticated — did you log in using a MergeSession URL, or the normal username, password, 2-step verification flow? The account-settings portal will only allow you to access security-sensitive settings in the latter case (i.e. if you logged in using a MergeSession URL, it will give you a username/password/2-step-verification prompt that you can’t skip.)

Was This So Bad?

We think it’s a rather significant hole in a strong authentication system if a user still has some form of “password” that is sufficient to take over full control of his account. However, we’re still confident that — even before rolling out their fix — enabling Google’s 2-step verification was unequivocally better than not doing so.

These days, attackers still have a lot of success using some very simple methods to take over accounts. For example, by:

• Creating a phishing site to trick users into giving up their passwords.
• Exploiting the fact that users often share passwords between sites, by cracking a (poorly-protected) password database from one site, and using the recovered passwords to attempt to break into users’ accounts on other sites.

Both of these examples represent types of attacks that should be prevented simply by having users apply common sense and good digital hygiene - i.e. don’t use the same password on more than one site, and don’t click suspicious links in email messages. Unfortunately, this sort of “user education” program is something that rarely works well in practice (and might not even make economic sense).

However, even with all-powerful ASPs, Google’s 2-step verification system should mitigate both of these types of attacks, even if users continue to do “stupid” things. Application-Specific Passwords are generated by Google, and not intended for users to memorize, so it’s extremely unlikely that a user might share one with other websites. Similarly, if a phishing site demanded users submit an Application-Specific Password, we imagine its success rate would be far lower (perhaps orders of magnitude lower) than normal.

That said, all-powerful ASPs still carry some serious potential for harm. If an attacker can trick a user into running some malware, that malware might be able to find and extract an ASP somewhere on that user’s system (for example, Pidgin, a popular chat client often used with Google Talk, stores passwords in plaintext in an XML file). In addition, thick-client applications, the primary consumer of ASPs, are rather notorious for poor SSL certificate verification, potentially allowing ASPs to be captured on the wire via MITM attacks.

Google’s fix helps this situation significantly. Though a compromised ASP could still inflict significant harm on a user, that user should ultimately retain control over his account (and the ability to revoke the ASP at the first sign something has gone wrong). However, we’re strong believers in the principle of least privilege, and we’d love to see Google implement some means to further-restrict the privileges of individual ASPs.

*Update #1*

Google has updated their verbage when an ASP is generated to warn users of their potential risk:

*Update #2*

Craig Young from nCircle gave a talk on similar ASP/2SV issues this week at the BSides event co-located with RSA!

Disclosure Timeline

How To Crack Authentication Required Windstream Email

2012/07/16: Duo researchers confirm presence of ASP weakness.2012/07/18: Issue reported to security@google.com.2012/07/20: Communication with Google Security Team clarifying the issue.2012/07/24: Issue is confirmed and deemed 'expected behavior' by Google Security Team.2013/02/21: Fix is pushed by Google to prevent ASP-initiated sessions from accessing sensitive account interfaces.2013/02/25: Public disclosure by Duo.

P.S.

Inspired to enable two-factor authentication with your Google account? No need to download yet another app. We recently added third-party account support to Duo Mobile so now your work and personal accounts can all live in one place!

Two-Factor Authentication Evaluation Guide

Download our free guide for a deep-dive into evaluating a modern two-factor solution that can meet your organization’s security needs.