Cracking MD5 Hash

In this article, you will learn how to crack a MD5 hash, but the article is limited and does not include cracking salted MD5s. I’m terribly sorry but I haven’t actually researched that.

Now, we need a tool and a bunch of documents. Lets hope you have a little diskspace on your HDD.

The first and primary tool we are using is ‘Cain & Abel’. But we will be using Cain, it can be downloaded from www.oxid.it (Click on Projects at the top and then download Cain & Abel — one program).

Cain is a MD5 cracker, and Abel is a kind of a R.A.T

You might be wondering why I haven’t used JTR (John the Ripper) in this article, I have been introduced to JTR a few times and read a few tuts on it but still, I hate all MS-DOS programs, unlike Cain which has a GUI. (it’s mean it is not a command- Line program.)

Now, I’m assuming you have your hash. If you just want to test how good Cain can be (although the wordlists are the ones that are helping) and its options, then Google ‘MD5 calculator’ there are a few that encrypt strings to MD5 but make sure its not something like (5#$FD*&^%HFG@$@$). Now, most crackers cant do that kind of shit.

Choose a word, and maybe a number in between 0 and 99 or something else.

Now, on to the cracking! The MD5 I have on my hand is (562bed16598a6d9cbc07d2e9ba6cef97). Now, you can go off to databases and try to crack that just to see how effective the article is.

Now, what good is a cracker with its victim hash without a few decent wordlists, there is a wordlist (3000 KB+) that comes with Cain. Now, lets download a few wordlists.

http://library.2ya.com has a few in ‘Webhacks / Bug Scan’ section on the left, download them all. And after you have downloaded them, I suggest moving them all to the Wordlist directory of Cain for faster and more reliable cracking.

In the image above we have opened the Cracker and I have circled with red around the ‘Cracker’ tab which must be clicked to proceed.