How to Crack NTHASH (commonly referred to as NTLM)…

Ok imagine this, you have got access to a file server and behold you find an unsecured, unencrypted backup of a domain controller (this isn’t made up I find these in networks sometimes!) and you yoink the NTDS.dit (or maybe it’s just a workstation SAM/SYSTEM file), you extract the hashes but now what, you need to crack those bad boys!

Check out the MS docs on how NT or LM Hashes are computed(hashed)! – (thanks @ANeilan for spotting my mistake!)

Leadership

Cyber Events vs Incident vs Attack

Cyber Events

Yesterday I was asked about “attack volumes” I see in the PwnDefend HoneyNet and it reminded me about what people think an “ATTACK” is and therefore spring my brain into thinking about how we as an industry communicate. Far too often I see “number of ATTACKS” being used my marketing/sales etc. where the numbers are simply ridiculous and not reflective of how offensive cyber operations actually work.

Let’s look at some examples:

“Gov. Greg Abbott warns Texas agencies seeing 10,000 attempted cyber attacks per minute from Iran”
Gov. Greg Abbott – article in the Texas Tribune by CASSANDRA POLLOCK