I Challenge You To Crack The Code
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I had quite an interesting experience recently. I was hired
by a company to perform a vulnerability assessment and
penetration test on their network. During the initial
meeting, one of the key technical staff presented me with a
challenge; He handed over the NTLM hash of the domain
Administrator account and challenged me to decipher it.
He explained that the complexity and length of the password
would prevent me from deciphering it during the time allotted
for the project. He was actually quite confident in my
impending failure.
In most cases, this individual would have been right on the
mark. On the other hand, I'm not sure he expected to
challenge someone who has close associates with discretionary
time on some of the most powerful computers in the world.
6 Hours, 2 Servers, 64GB of Memory, and 32 Processors Later
and.....
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It took just under six hours to decipher the password. Of
course, my 'associates' were using a program of my choice
on servers with 32 processors and 64GB of RAM a piece.
It's nice to have friends with access like this.
Especially in my line of work. Needless to say, my client
was shocked when I called him the next day and gave him
the password.
Let's Have Some Fun: A Challenge For You
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(In order for you to do this, you need to go to:
http://www.defendingthenet.com/NewsLetters/
CrackTheCode-ThatsADirectChallenge.htm)
Shortly after this experience, I started thinking about
writing an article about it. Then I thought to myself,
why write just an article? Why not come up with a challenge
for our readers?
Hidden in this article is information that will ultimately
provide you with a phrase that has been encrypted. You will
need to know a few pieces of general information such as,
where to find the hash in this article,
how to extract the hash from the article, what the password
is that will reveal the hash, and what type of hash is being
used! Still with me on this? You will need to do all this
before you can start cracking the encrypted phrase.
First, you need to find the hashed phrase located in this
article. I'll give you a hint; I recently wrote an article
about hiding messages in files. This article can be found
on the Defending The Net Newsletter Archive. It is also in
the www.CastleCops.com archive. Oh, and once you find where
the hash is you will need a password to extract it. This one
I am going to give away. The password to extract the hash
is 'letmein' (without the ' ' of course).
Then, you will need a tool that can easily handle
deciphering of the hash once you extract it from this
article. There are quite a few out there that will do the
job, however, I highly recommend using pnva naq noyr i2.69,
a publicly available security tool that no self respecting
security engineer should be without. You will also need to
know the type of hashing algorithm that was used. I decided
to use zrffntr qvtrfg svir because it is relatively
well-known. (Try saying that 13 times real fast!)
Conclusion
----------------
The first person to successfully unravel this riddle and
e-mail me at riddle@paralogic.net with the deciphered phrase,
along with a detailed description of how they accomplished
the task, will receive a 512MB, USB2.0 Jump Drive. As soon
as we receive this information we will post it on the main
page of www.defendingthenet.com.
About The Author
----------------
Darren Miller is an Information Security Consultant with
over sixteen years experience. He has written many
technology & security articles, some of which have been
published in nationally circulated magazines & periodicals.
If you would like to contact Darren you can e-mail him at
Darren.Miller@ParaLogic.Net