Tag: password

MD5 Password Cracking

A lot of computer systems and applications use standard MD5 hash algorithms to store passwords. Using a straight unsalted MD5 hash of a password in order to store it securely used to be acceptable a few years ago but a recent technique similar to rainbow tables allows someone to recover the password by comparing the MD5 hashed password against a pregenerated list of known MD5 hashes of words. So all anyone has to do is compare your MD5 stored hash against this known list of MD5 hashes and they can then crack your MD5 hash to determine what your password string is. Here are a couple of good online searchable databases of MD5 hashes:

You can also try a Google search. Just take your MD5 hash and use that as the search term in Google. There is a pretty good chance that someone has already cracked the MD5 password and posted the results on their website which Google has indexed.

Hand Holding a Key

How To Remove the Password or Document Protection on a Microsoft Word Document

These instructions are for the version of Word that comes with Microsoft Office XP or Office 2003. I will explain 3 different techniques so hopefully one of the three techniques will work for you.

Technique 1

1. Switch to the HTML code view of the Word document by using Microsoft Script Editor. You can launch the Microsoft Script Editor by pressing the ALT+SHIFT+F11 key combination while in Word.
2. Search for the word “Password” and you should find a block of text that looks like this:

<w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
<w:UnprotectPassword>19E8E61E</w:UnprotectPassword>

3. You can remove the document protection by deleting those two lines and then save the document. When you reopen the document the protection should be gone. If you want to remove a document password then replace the password with “00000000”. So for the example above, you would replace “19E8E61E” with “00000000”. Save the document and close the script editor. When you reopen the document, the password should be gone.

Note: This technique does not work for “File Open” password protected Word files. Office encrypts these files with a 40 bit key which can not be bypassed with this technique.

Technique 2

This technique removes the “document protection” feature of a Microsoft Word XP or 2003 document.

1. Create a new Word document.

2. From the top menu bar select Insert | File and then browse for the Word document that you want to remove the password on.

3. Select the password protected Word document and select Insert which will insert the password protected Word document into the new empty Word document you just created.

4. Finally, select Tools from the top menu and confirm that there is no longer an “Unprotect document” menu item which will mean the document protection has been removed.

Technique 3

1. Open the document as “read-only”

2. Save it under a different file name but save it as “.rtf” file format

3. Open the .rtf document and then resave it as “.doc” file format

4. Done. The password should now be removed from the document. Some of the formatting may be a little off due to having saved it in .rtf format but the password should be removed.

Note: Similar to technique 1, this method does not work for “File Open” password protected Word files.

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MySQL – How to Create an Admin User Account

If you want to create an additional admin account for MySQL server, connect to the MySQL server with a MySQL client program and execute the following command:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Change the word “admin” to whatever username you want to use for the admin account and change “password” to whatever password you want to use for that account.

The above SQL command creates an admin account that can only connect from the server which is running the MySQL database service. If you want to allow the admin account to log in from any IP address then replace “localhost” with “%”. The “%” acts as a wild card character.

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

If you want to only allow the admin account to log in from a specific IP or range of IPs then use the wildcard character:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'admin'@'192.168.1.%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

The above example allows the admin account to log in from any IP address that starts with 192.168.1.

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Open Firmware Password Reset

Pre-Intel processor Macs have something called the “Open Firmware”. This is roughly equivalent to the BIOS on non-Apple PC computers. You can set a password on the Open Firmware which will prevent people from booting off a CD among other things. Here is how you reset the Open Firmware password:

1. Change the amount of memory in the computer. It does not matter if you add or subtract memory. If you only have one stick of memory in your computer or memory must be installed in pairs and you only have a sigle pair, then you may need to buy more memory.

2. After changing the amount of memory, reset the PRAM on the computer by pressing command+option+p+r when you boot it up. When you hear a chime that means the PRAM has been reset. Continue holding down command+option+p+r when you hear the chime and keep holding the keys down until you hear 2 more chimes for a total of 3 chimes. You want to reset the PRAM 3 times to ensure it is truly reset. Doing this 3 times ensures it is definitely reset.

3. Restore the amount of memory that the computer should have.

4. Done. The Open firmware password has now been reset.