Useful Freeware

Freeware password recovery tools lineup

Over the years (wearing my IT hat) I needed to recover various forgotten passwords for different people, so I started a list of tools that could be used to do some of these tasks. I will be adding to the list and updating this post as I stumble upon such tools.

Windows Password Recovery Tools

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (Bootdisk/CD) is a bootable disk to help you reset a windows logon password to any local user account and can help unlocking a locked account. You need to reboot your system in order to use it and boot from the provided CD image. It works somewhat like ERD Commander’s password change tool.

LCP – User account auditing and password recovery. Supports dictionary, brute-force and hybrid attacks. Very nice program similar to @stake’s tool L0phtCrack, but free.

ophcrack – It is a windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is an extremely fast processing, even though it may not find the password and I had a hard time to make it work, while installed locally. They also provide a bootable cd, which is easier to work with…

Office Password Recovery Tools

Shatterock Database Password Sleuth – Helps you to recover passwords from Microsoft Access Databases 95-2002 (.mdb).

Word/Excel Password Recovery Wizard – This seems to be a nice one for recovering Word and Excel passwords.

BIOS Password Recovery Tools

BIOS Central provides some utilities allowing you to reveal BIOS passwords. Most of those are kind of complicated to use or DOS based, but I have not found any others…

Multifunctional Password Recovery Tools

Cain & Abel is a comprehensive windows password recovery and analysis tool. It allows decoding stored password from several windows utilities (like CISCO VPN Client profiles, RDP stored passwords, etc.). It can show cached passwords like dial-up, protected storage, IE7, wireless networking, and others passwords.

Cain also contains a network sniffer for a variety of protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SMB, ICQ, TDS and others), allowing recovering network services passwords. The Password cracker can help you decode variety of hashes as well. It has many other features like recording VOIP conversations, revealing password boxes, cracking encrypted passwords using brute-force, dictionary attacks, etc.

Overall it is an easy to use software to help network administrators improve security.

NirSoft Password Recovery Tools are a nice, small, easy to use and portable utilities to recover password for different windows applications. Here is a list:

• MessenPass – Can show stored passwords for several IM programs (ICQ Lite, MSN/Windows/Live Messenger, Yahoo, Google Talk, Miranda, GAIM, etc.).
• Mail PassView – Reveals stored password from various e-mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, IncrediMail, Outlook and Outlook Express, etc.
• IE PassView – Reveals passwords, stored by IE 4.0+
• Protected Storage PassView – Shows passwords and autocomplete information, stored by IE, MSN Explorer, Outlook Express.
• Asterisk Logger – This utility can reveal passwords stored behing asterisks in standard text boxes.
• Network Password Recovery – Can help you recover MSN/Windows messenger, stored LAN share passwords, IE7 Basic or Digest Authentication stored passwords
• PstPassword – recovers password from Outlook 97+ .pst files.
• WirelessKeyView – Recovers WEP/WPA keys, stored by windows’ Wireless Zero Configuration service.
• Remote Desktop PassView – can help you determine passwords, stored by Remote Desktop Utility in the .rdp files.

TrueCrypt – on the fly encryption

TrueCrypt helps you to create and operate an encrypted file, which you can mount as a volume (data storage device) on your computer. In other words you can create the encrypted file and mount it as a drive letter and it behaves as yet another hard drive on your computer. The beauty of it is that you can copy files to and from it like between normal drives on your computer.

Here are some feature highlights:

• Files are automatically encrypted and decrypted on the fly;
• The entire filesystem is encrypted (file allocation table, files, directories, etc.);
• Never saves any unencrypted data to a disk;
• Support for “hidden” volumes. It is a encrypted volume inside an encrypted volume, but you need to know the volume name and the password before you can access it. It is not visible otherwise.
• Support for multiple encryption algorithms (AES, Serpent, Twofish) and even a cascading combination of them;
• It can prepare for you a CD/DVD volume, so you can use it as a read-only encrypted medium;
• Format, encrypt and use a normal hard drive partition as well as a file as a TrueCrypt encrypted volume. It can even encrypt an entire USB drive. Sweet!

Overall an extremely useful program.