CISCO TYPE 7 PASSWORD DECRYPT / DECODER / CRACKER TOOL

The Firewall.cx Cisco Password Decoder Tool (see below) provides readers with the ability to decrypt 'Type 7' cisco passwords.

Enter Your Encrypted Password Below:

Encrypted Password:     

Decrypted Password: 

To use this tool, simply copy & paste your 'type 7' password in the provided field below and click on the 'Submit' button. The system will then process and reveal the text-based password. For security reasons, our system will not track or save any passwords decoded.

Note: If your a Network Engineer or Administrator, be sure to check out our highly recommended Web Monitoring/Proxy solutionWeb Monitoring/Proxy solution that includes:

• Realtime Monitoring of which files users can download
• Phishing site protection
• Complete Internet access control
• Automatically filter & limit web browsing and much more

MORE INFORMATION ON CISCO PASSWORDS AND WHICH CAN BE DECODED

Back in late 1995, a non-Cisco source had released a program that was able to decrypt user passwords (and other type of passwords) in Cisco configuration files.

This new program was a major headache for Cisco since most users were relying on Cisco's equipment for their repulation of strong encryption and security capabilities. What users were not aware was that there are two different type of encryption mechanisms used by Cisco's IOS, one which was reversable (Type 7 Passwords) and one which is not (Type 5).

Even until today, administrators and users still make use of the weaker Type 7 passwords, mainly because they aren't aware that these passwords can be decrypted.

KNOWING WHAT CAN AND CANNOT BE DECRYPTED

It is important to understand that only the following type of passwords are able to be decrypted. Thefollowing examples show which common areas Type 7 passwords are used in Cisco equipment:

User Passwords

Used to create users with different privilege levels on Cisco devices.

username chris privilege 15 password 7 02000D490E110E2D40000A01

 Enable Password

Used to gain elevated access on the Cisco device.

enable password 7 01150F165E1C07032D

 Access Point SSID Keys

Used to configure the SSID key on a Cisco wireless access point:

dot11 ssid private
   vlan 1
   authentication open
   authentication key-management wpa
   guest-mode
   mbssid guest-mode
   infrastructure-ssid optional
   wpa-psk ascii 7 01150F165E1C07032D

If wpa-psk ascii 0 is used then the ascii text that follows is clear text and its not encrypted.

ENCRYPTION METHODS CANNOT BE DECRYPTED

As opposed to Type 7 Passwords which can easily be decrypted, Secret 5 passwords cannot be decrypted as the password has ben hashed with MD5. This is also the recommened way of creating and storing passwords on your Cisco devices.

Following are a number of examples where Secret 5 passwords can and should be used:

User Passwords

username chris privilege 15 secret 5 $1$KNaN$SCe/xMbtBEe6ch5d2bq5J.

Enable Password

enable secret 5 $1$2UjJ$cDZ05dfEGA7mHfE4RSbWiQ.

Unfortunately Access Point SSID Keys do not support Type 5 passwords. This means that any passwords configured into the access point should be stored in a safe place.

 We trust the information was valuable and hope users will stop using Type 7 Passwords in mission critical equipment.

LINUX FILE & FOLDER PERMISSION

File & folder security is a big part of any operating system and Linux is no exception!

These permissions allow you to choose exactly who can access your files and folders, providing an overall enhanced security system. This is one of the major weaknesses in the older Windows operating systems where, by default, all users can see each other's files (Windows 95, 98, Me).

For the more superior versions of the Windows operating system such as NT, 2000, XP and 2003 things look a lot safer as they fully support file & folder permissions, just as Linux has since the beginning.

Together, we'll now examine a directory listing from our Linux lab server, to help us understand the information provided. While a simple 'ls' will give you the file and directory listing within a given directory, adding the flag '-l' will reveal a number of new fields that we are about to take a look at:

It's possible that most Linux users have seen similar information regarding their files and folders and therefore should feel pretty comfortable with it. If on the other hand you happen to fall in to the group of people who haven't seen such information before, then you either work too much in the GUI interface of Linux, or simply haven't had much experience with the operating system :)

Whatever the case, don't disappear - it's easier than you think!!

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS OUTPUT MEAN ? ESPECIALLY ALL THOSE 'RWX' LINES?!

Let's start from scratch, analysing the information in the previous screenshot.

In the yellow column on the right we have the file & directory names (dirlist.txt, document1, document2 etc.) - nothing new here. Next, in the green column, we will find the time and date of creation.

Note that the date and time column will not always display in the format shown. If the file or directory it refers to was created in a year different from the current one, it will then show only the date, month and year, discarding the time of creation.

For example, if the file 'dirlist.txt' was created on the 27th of July, 2004, then the system would show:

Jun 27 2004 dirlist.txt

instead of

Jun 27 11:28 dirlist.txt

A small but important note when examining files and folders! Lastly, the date will change when modifying the file. As such, if we edited a file created last year, then the next time we typed 'ls -l', the file's date information would change to today's date. This is a way you can check to see if files have been modified or tampered with.

The next column (purple) contains the file size in bytes - again nothing special here.

Next column (orange) shows the permissions. Every file in Linux is 'owned' by a particular user.. normally this is the user (owner) who created the file.. but you can always give ownership to someone else.

The owner might belong to a particular group, in which case this file is also associated with the user's group. In our example, the left column labeled 'User' refers to the actual user that owns the file, while the right column labeled 'group' refers to the group the file belongs to.

Looking at the file named 'dirlist.txt', we can now understand that it belongs to the user named 'root' and group named 'sys'.

Following the permissions is the column with the cyan border in the listing.

The system identifies files by their inode number, which is the unique file system identifier for the file. A directory is actually a listing of inode numbers with their corresponding filenames. Each filename in a directory is a link to a particular inode.

Links let you give a single file more than one name. Therefore, the numbers indicated in the cyan column specifies the number of links to the file.

As it turns out, a directory is actually just a file containing information about link-to-inode associations.

Next up is a very important column, that's the first one on the left containing the '-rwx----w-' characters. These are the actual permissions set for the particular file or directory we are examining.

To make things easier, we've split the permissions section into a further 4 columns as shown above. The first column indicates whether we are talking about a directory (d), file (-) or link (l).

In the newer Linux distributions, the system will usually present the directory name in colour, helping it to stand out from the rest of the files. In the case of a file, a dash (-) or the letter 'f' is used, while links make the use of the letter 'l' (l). For those unfamiliar with links, consider them something similar to the Windows shortcuts.

Column 2 refers to the user rights. This is the owner of the file, directory or link and these three characters determine what the owner can do with it.

The 3 characters on column 2 are the permissions for the owner (user rights) of the file or directory. The next 3 are permissions for thegroup that the file is owned by and the final 3 characters define the access permissions for the others group, that is, everyone else not part of the group.

So, there are 3 possible attributes that make up file access permissions:

r - Read permission. Whether the file may be read. In the case of a directory, this would mean the ability to list the contents of the directory. w - Write permission. Whether the file may be written to or modified. For a directory, this defines whether you can make any changes to the contents of the directory. If write permission is not set then you will not be able to delete, rename or create a file. x - Execute permission. Whether the file may be executed. In the case of a directory, this attribute decides whether you have permission to enter, run a search through that directory or execute some program from that directory.

Let's take a look at another example:

Take the permissions of 'red-bulb', which are drwxr-x---. The owner of this directory is user david and the group owner of the directory is sys. The first 3 permission attributes are rwx. These permissions allow full read, write and execute access to the directory to user david. So we conclude that david has full access here.

The group permissions are r-x. Notice there is no write permission given here so while members of the group sys can look at the directory and list its contents, they cannot create new files or sub-directories. They also cannot delete any files or make changes to the directory content in any way.

Lastly, no one else has any access because the access attributes for others are ---.

If we assume the permissions are drw-r--r-- you see that the owner of the directory (david) can list and make changes to its contents (Read and Write access) but, because there is no execute (x) permission, the user is unable to enter it! You must have read andexecute (r-x) in order to enter a directory and list its contents. Members of the group sys have a similar problem, where they seem to be able to read (list) the directory's contents but can't enter it because there is no execute (x) permission given!

Lastly, everyone else can also read (list) the directory but is unable to enter it because of the absence of the execute (x) permission.

Here are some more examples focusing on the permissions:

-r--r--r-- :This means that owner, group and everyone else has only read permissions to the file (remember, if there's no 'd' or 'l', then we are talking about a file).

-rw-rw-rw- : This means that the owner, group and everyone else has read and write permissions.

-rwxrwxrwx : Here, the owner, group and everyone else has full permissions, so they can all read, write and execute the file (-).

MODIFYING OWNERSHIP & PERMISSIONS

So how do you change permissions or change the owner of a file?

Changing the owner or group owner of a file is very simple, you just type 'chown user:group filename.ext', where 'user' and 'group' are those to whom you want to give ownership of the file. The 'group' parameter is optional, so if you type 'chown david file.txt', you will give ownership of file.txt to the user named david.

In the case of a directory, nothing much changes as the same command is used. However, because directories usually contain files that also need to be assigned to the new user or group, we use the '-R' flag, which stands for 'recursive' - in other words all subdirectories and their files: 'chown -R user:group dirname'.

To change permissions you use the 'chmod' command. The possible options here are 'u' for the user, 'g' for the group, 'o' for other, and 'a' for all three. If you don't specify one of these letters it will change to all by default. After this you specify the permissions to add or remove using '+' or '-' . Let's take a look at an example to make it easier to understand:

If we wanted to add read, write and execute to the user of a particular file, we would type the following 'chmod u+rwx file.txt'. If on the other hand you typed 'chmod g-rw file.txt' you will take away read and write permissions of that file for the group .

While it's not terribly difficult to modify the permissions of a file or directory, remembering all the flags can be hard. Thankfully there's another way, which is less complicated and much faster. By replacing the permissions with numbers, we are able to calculate the required permissions and simply enter the correct sum of various numbers instead of the actual rights.

The way this works is simple. We are aware of three different permissions, Read (r), Write (w) and Execute (x). Each of these permissions is assigned a number as follows:

r (read) - 4

w (write) - 2

x (execute) - 1

Now, to correctly assign a permission, all you need to do is add up the level you want, so if you want someone to have read and write, you get 4+2=6, if you want someone to have just execute, it's just 1.. zero means no permissions. You work out the number for each of the three sections (owner, group and everyone else).

If you want to give read write and execute to the owner and nothing to everyone else, you'd get the number 700. Starting from the left, the first digit (7) presents the permissions for the owner of the file, the second digit (0) is the permissions for the group, and the last (0) is the permissions for everyone else. You get the 7 by adding read, write and execute permissions according to the numbers assigned to each right as shown in the previous paragraphs: 4+2+1 = 7.

r, w, x Permissions	Calculated Number
---	0
--x	1
-w-	2
-wx	3 (2+1)
r--	4
r-x	5 (4+1)
rw-	6 (4+2)
rwx	7 (4+2+1)

If you want to give full access to the owner, only read and execute to the group, and only execute to everyone else, you'd work it out like this :

owner: rwx = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7

group: r-x = 4 + 0 + 1 = 5

everyone: --x = 0 + 0 + 1 = 1

So your number will be 751, 7 for owner, 5 for group, and 1 for everyone. The command will be 'chmod 751 file.txt'. It's simple isn't it ?

If you want to give full control to everyone using all possible combinations, you'd give them all 'rwx' which equals to the number '7', so the final three digit number would be '777':

If on the other hand you decide not to give anyone any permission, you would use '000' (now nobody can access the file, not even you!). However, you can always change the permissions to give yourself read access, by entering 'chmod 400 file.txt'.

For more details on the 'chmod' command, please take a look at the man pages.

As we will see soon, the correct combination of user and group permissions will allow us to perform our work while keeping our data safe from the rest of the world.

For example in order for a user or group to enter a directory, they must have at least read (r) and execute (x) permissions on the directory, otherwise access to it is denied:

As seen here, user 'mailman' is trying to access the 'red-bulb' directory which belongs to user 'david' and group 'sys'. Mailman is not a member of the 'sys' group and therefore can't access it. At the same time the folder's permissions allow neither the group nor everyone to access it.

Now, what we did is alter the permission so 'everyone' has at least read and execute permissions so they are able to enter the folder - let's check it out:

Here we see the 'mailman' user successfully entering the 'red-bulb' directory because everyone has read (r) and execute (x) access to it!

The world of Linux permissions is pretty user friendly as long as you see from the right perspective :) Practice and reviewing the theory will certainly help you remember the most important information so you can perform your work without much trouble.

If you happen to forget something, you can always re-visit us - any time of the day!

Continuing on to our last page, we will provide you with a few links to some of the world's greatest Linux resources, covering Windows to Linux migration, various troubleshooting techniques, forums and much more that will surely be of help.

ADVANCED LINUX COMMAND

Now that you're done learning some of the Basic Linux commands and how to use them to install Linux Software, it's time we showed you some of the other ways to work with Linux. Bear in mind that each distribution of Linux (Redhat, SUSE, Mandrake etc) will come with a slightly different GUI (Graphical User Interface) and some of them have done aREALLY GOOD JOB of creating GUI configuration tools so that you never need to type commands at the command line.

•

VI EDITOR

For example, if you want to edit a text file you can easily use one of the powerful GUI tools like Kate, Kwrite etc., which are all like notepad in Windows though much more powerful; they have features such as multiple file editing and syntax highlighting (if you open an HTML file it understands the HTML tags and highlights them for you). However, you can also use the very powerful vi editor.

When first confronted by vi most users are totally lost, you open a file in vi (e.g vi document1) and try to type, but nothing seems to happen.. the system just keeps beeping!

Well that's because vi functions in two modes, one is the command mode, where you can give vi commands such as open a file, exit, split the view, search and replace etc., and the other mode is the insert view where you actually type text!

Don't be put off by the fact that vi doesn't have a pretty GUI interface to go with it, this is an incredibly powerful text editor that would be well worth your time learning... once you're done with it you'll never want to use anything else!

Realising that most people would find vi hard to use straight off, there is a useful little walk-through tutorial that you can access by typingvimtutor at a command line. The tutorial opens vi with the tutorial in it, and you try out each of the commands and shortcuts in vi itself. It's very easy and makes navigating around vi a snap. Check it out.

•GREP

Another very useful Linux command is the grep command. This little baby searches for a string in any file. The grep command is frequently used in combination with other commands in order to search for a specific string. For example, if we wanted to check our web server's log file for a specific URL query or IP address, the 'grep' command would do this job just fine.

If, on the other hand, you want to find every occurence of 'hello world' in every .txt file you have, you would type grep "hello world" *.txt

You'll see some very common command structures later on that utilise 'grep'. At the same time, you can go ahead and check grep's man page by typing man grep , it has a whole lot of very powerful options.

•

PS - PROCESS ID (PID) DISPLAY

The ps command will show all the tasks you are currently running on the system, it's the equivalent of Windows Task Manager and you'll be happy to know that there are also GUI versions of 'ps'.

If you're logged in as root in your Linux system and type ps -aux , you'll see all processes running on the system by every user, however, for security purposes, users will only be able to see processes owned by them when typing the same command.

Again, man ps will provide you with a bundle of options available by the command.

•KILL

The 'kill' command is complementary to the 'ps' command as it will allow you to terminate a process revealed with the previous command. In cases where a process is not responding, you would use the following syntax to effectively kill it: kill -9 pid where 'pid' is the Process ID (PID) that 'ps' displays for each task.

In the above example, we ran a utility called 'bandwidth' twice which is shown as two different process IDs (7171 & 13344) using the pscommand. We then attempted to kill one of them using the command kill -9 7171 . The next time we ran the 'ps', the system reported that a process that was started with the './bandwidth' command had been previously killed.

Another useful flag we can use with the 'kill' command is the -HUP. This neat flag won't kill the process but pause it and at the same time force it to reload its configuration. So, if you've got a service running and need to restart it because of changes made in its configuration file, then the -HUP flag will do just fine. Many people look at it as an alternative 'reload' command.

The complete syntax to make use of the flag is: kill -HUP pid where 'pid' is the process ID number you can obtain using the 'ps' command, just as we saw in the previous examples.

CHAINING COMMANDS, REDIRECTING OUTPUT, PIPING

In Linux, you can chain groups of commands together with incredible ease, this is where the true power of the Linux command line exists, you use small tools, each of which does one little task and passes the output on to the next one.

For example, when you run the ps aux command, you might see a whole lot of output that you cannot read in one screen, so you can use the pipe symbol ( | ) to send the output of 'ps' to 'grep' which will search for a string in that output. This is known as 'piping' as it's similar to plumbing where you use a pipe to connect two things together.

Say you want to find the task 'antispam' : you can run ps aux | grep antispam . Ps 'pipes' its output to grep and it then searches for the string, showing you only the line with that text.

If you wanted ps to display one page at a time you can pipe the output of ps to either more or less . The advantage of less is that it allows you to scroll upwards as well. Try this: ps aux | less . Now you can use the cursors to scroll through the output, or use pageup, pagedown.

•ALIAS

The 'alias' command is very neat, it lets you make a shortcut keyword for another longer command. Say you don't always want to type ps aux | less, you can create an alias for it.. we'll call our alias command 'pl'. So you type  alias pl='ps aux | less' .

Now whenever you type pl , it will actually run ps aux | less  - Neat, is'nt it?

You can view the aliases that are currently set by typing alias:

As you can see, there are quite a few aliases already listed for the 'root' account we are using. You'll be suprised to know that most Linux distributions automatically create a number of aliases by default - these are there to make your life as easy as possible and can be deleted anytime you wish.

OUTPUT REDIRECTION

It's not uncommon to want to redirect the output of a command to a text file for further processing. In the good old DOS operating system, this was achieved by using the '>' operator. Even today, with the latest Windows operating systems, you would open a DOS command prompt and use the same method!

The good news is that Linux also supports these functions without much difference in the command line.

For example, if we wanted to store the listing of a directory into a file, we would type the following: ls > dirlist.txt:

As you can see, we've taken the output of 'ls' and redirected it to our file. Let's now take a look and see what has actually been stored in there by using the command cat dirlist.txt :

As expected, the dirlist.txt file contains the output of our previous command. So you might ask yourself 'what if I need to append the results?' - No problem here, as we've already got you covered.

When there's a need for appending files or results, as in DOS we simply use the double >> operator. By using the command it will append the new output to the file we have specified in the command line:

The above example clearly shows the content of our file named 'document2' which is then appended to the previously created file 'dirlist.txt'. With the use of the 'cat' command, we are able to examine its contents and make sure the new data has been appended.

Note:

By default, the single > will overwrite the file if it exists, so if you give the ls > dirlist.txt command again, it will overwrite the first dirlist.txt. However, if you specify >> it will add the new output below the previous output in the file. This is known as output redirection.

In Windows and DOS you can only run one command at a time, however, in Linux you can run many commands simultaneously. For example, let's say we want to see the directory list, then delete all files ending with .txt, then see the directory list again.

This is possible in Linux using one statement as follows : ls -l; rm -f *.txt; ls -l . Basically you separate each command using a semicolon, ';'. Linux then runs all three commands one after the other. This is also known as command chaining.

BACKGROUND PROCESSES

If you affix an ampersand '&' to the end of any command, it will run in the background and not disturb you, there is no equivalent for this in Windows and it is very useful because it lets you start a command in the background and run other tasks while waiting for that to complete.

The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you will not see the output from the command on your screen since it is in the background, but we can redirect the output to a file the way we did two paragraphs above.

For example, if you want to search through all the files in a directory for the word 'Bombadil', but you want this task to run in the background and not interrupt you, you can type this: grep "Bombadil" *.* >> results.txt& . Notice that we've added the ampersand '&' character to the end of the command, so it will now run in the background and place the results in the file results.txt . When you press enter, you'll see something like this :

$ grep "Bombadil" *.* >> results.txt&

[1] 1272

Our screen shot confirms this. We created a few new files that contained the string 'Bombadil' and then gave the command grep "Bombadil" *.* >> results.txt& . The system accepted our command and placed the process in the background using PID (Process ID) 14976. When we next gave the 'ls' command to see the listing of our directory we saw our new file 'results.txt' which, as expected, contained the files and lines where our string was found.

If you run a 'ps' while this is executing a very complex command that takes some time to complete, you'll see the command in the list. Remember that you can use all the modifiers in this section with any combination of Linux commands, that's what makes it so powerful. You can take lots of simple commands and chain, pipe, redirect them in such a way that they do something complicated!

Back to Linux Intro Section                                 

INSTALLING SOFTWARE ON LINUX

Installing software in Linux is very different from Windows for one very simple reason: most Linux programs come in 'source code' form. This allows you to modify any program (if you're a programmer) to suit your purposes! While this is incredibly powerful for a programmer, for most of us who are not- we just want to start using the program!

 

SHOW ME THE WAY MASTER....

Most programs will come 'zipped' just like they do in Windows, in other words they pack all the files together into one file and compress it to a more manageable size. Depending on the zipping program used, the method of unzipping may vary, however, each program will have step by step instructions on how to unpack it.

Most of the time the 'tar' program will be used to unpack a package and unzipping the program is fairly straightforward. This is initiated by typing 'tar -zxvf file-to-unzip.tgz' where 'file-to-unzip.tgz' is the actual filename you wish to unzip. We will explain the four popular options we've used (zxvf) but you can read the 'tar man' page if you are stuck or need more information.

As mentioned, the 'tar' program is used to unpack a package we've downloaded and would like to install. Because most packages use 'tar' to create one file for easy downloads, gzip (Linux's equivalent to the Winzip program) is used to compress the tar file (.gz), reducing the size and making it easier to transfer. This also explains the reason most files have extensions such as '.tgz' or '.tar.gz'.

To make life easy, instead of giving two commands to decompress (unzip) and unpack the package, we provide tar with the -z option to automatically unzip to package and then proceed with unpacking it (-x). Here are the options in greater detail:

-z : Unzip tar package before unpacking it.

-x : Extract/Unpack the package

-v : Verbosely list files processed

-f : use archive file (filename provided)

Because the list of files was long, we've cut the bottom part to make it fit in our small window.

Once you have unzipped the program, go into its directory and look for a file called INSTALL, most programs will come with this file. It contains detailed instructions on how to install it, including the necessary commands to be typed, depending on the Linux distribution you have. After you've got that out of the way, you're ready to use the three magic commands that install 99% of all software in Linux :)

Open the program directory and type ./configure. [1st magic command]

You'll see a whole lot of output that you may not understand; this is when the software you're installing is automatically checking your system to analyze the options that will work best. Unlike the Windows world, where programs are made to work on a very general computer, Linux programs automatically customize themselves to fit your system.

Think of it as the difference between buying ready-made clothes and having tailor made clothes especially designed for you. This is one of the most important reasons why programs are in the 'source code' form in Linux.

In some cases, the ./configure command will not succeed and will produce errors that will not allow you to take the step and compile your program. In these cases, you must read the errors, fix any missing library files (most common causes) or problems and try again:

As you can see, we've run into a few problems while trying to configure this program on our lab machine, so we looked for a different program that would work for the purpose of this demonstration!

This ./configure finished without any errors, so the next step is to type make. [2nd magic command]

This simple command will magically convert the source code into a useable program... the best analogy of this process is that in the source code are all the ingredients in a recipe, if you understand programming, you can change the ingredients to make the dish better. Typing the make command takes the ingredients and cooks the whole meal for you! This process is known as 'compiling' the program

If make finishes successfully, you will want to put all the files into the right directories, for example, all the help files in the help files directory, all the configuration files in the /etc directory (covered in the pages that follow).

To perform this step, you have to log in as the superuser or 'root' account, if you don't know this password you can't do this.

Assuming you are logged in as root, type make install. [3rd magic command]

Lastly, once our program has been configured, compiled and installed in /usr/local/bin with the name of 'bwn-ng', we are left with a whole bunch of extra files that are no longer useful, these can be cleaned using the make clean command - but this, as you might have guessed, is not considered a magic command :)

There, that's it!

Now here's the good news... that was the old hard way!

All the people involved with Linux realised that most people don't need to read the source code and change the program and don't want to compile programs, so they have a new way of distributing programs in what is known as 'rpm' (red hat package manager) format.

This is one single file of a pre-compiled program, you just have to double click the rpm file (in the Linux graphical interface - X) and it will install it on your system for you!

In the event that you find a program that is not compiling with 'make' you can search on the net (we recommend www.pbone.net ) for an rpm based on your Linux distribution and version. Installation then is simply one click away for the graphical X desktop, or one command away for the hardcore Linux enthusiasts!

Because the 'rpm' utility is quite complex with a lot of flags and options, we would highly recommend you read its 'man' page before attempting to use it to install a program.

One last note about rpm is that it will also check to see if there are any dependent programs or files that should or shouldn't be touched during an install or uninstall. By doing so, it is effectively protecting your operating system from accidentally overwriting or deleting a critical system file, causing a lot of problems later on!