Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Malware & Threats

Researchers Remotely Harvest Password Hints from Windows 7, 8

The password hints saved in Windows 7 and Windows 8 can be retrieved and decoded by attackers, two researchers have found.

The password hints saved in Windows 7 and Windows 8 can be retrieved and decoded by attackers, two researchers have found.

While going through the registry on a Windows 8 machine, Trustwave researchers discovered a new key, “UserPasswordHint” which contained the password hints created by the user, Jonathan Claudius, a vulnerability researcher at Trustwave SpiderLabs, wrote on the company blog Thursday. Claudius and co-researcher Ryan Reynolds, a penetration tester for public accounting and consulting firm Crowe Horwath, were studying automated tools to effectively extract Windows registry information.

The pair soon worked out “how to how to extract/decode User Password Hints from the Windows registry,” Claudius said. The researchers found that the value stored in the registry keys were obscured by adding zeros, but had not been encrypted.

Claudius used a small Ruby script to strip out the zeros and decode the stored values, according to the blog. “Although this stuff looked a bit unreadable on the surface we can now see that it can clearly be decoded and could be used by tools that extract information from the” Security Account Manager, he said.

Claudius and Reynolds had been examining how hashes were getting corrupted when being extracted from the registry using tools such as Metasploit, Cain and Able, Pwdump, Fgdump, L0phtcrack, Samdump, Creddump, Pwdump5, and Pwdump7. They’d presented their research at Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences last month and were working with developers to get the products patched.

Claudius submitted the script to extract password hints as an update to Metasploit’s hashdump module, he said. With the new module, people can use the open source penetration testing toolkit to grab user password hints from Windows 7 and 8 systems, he said.

“This seems like it would be very helpful for penetration testers by giving them more insight into what the user’s password might be,” Claudius said.

In the blog comments, Claudius acknowledged that encrypting the hints may not be the answer anyone who has physical access to the machine can try to log in and see the associated hint for that username “on a one-by-one basis.”

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

His focus and rationale for updating the Metasploit module was to “obtain this information remotely as part of a post-exploitation process and steal all the hints on the system,” he said in the comments.

Written By

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Malware & Threats

The NSA and FBI warn that a Chinese state-sponsored APT called BlackTech is hacking into network edge devices and using firmware implants to silently...

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Cyberwarfare

An engineer recruited by intelligence services reportedly used a water pump to deliver Stuxnet, which reportedly cost $1-2 billion to develop.

Malware & Threats

Unpatched and unprotected VMware ESXi servers worldwide have been targeted in a ransomware attack exploiting a vulnerability patched in 2021.

Malware & Threats

Apple’s cat-and-mouse struggles with zero-day exploits on its flagship iOS platform is showing no signs of slowing down.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.