Hack Windows XP Password

Have you ever been locked out of your own account in XP? Have your parents set an Administrator password and hence you can only use your computer after you study? Or Do you want to hack your friend’s PC??

In this post, you’ll get answer to all these questions. We will look at how to Hack Windows XP password. And By hack I mean, we will see the Password in plain text. YES! It’s possible.

But before proceeding, you should have the basic knowledge of Windows and how it stores your password.

1. Windows stores its User account’s Password in an encrypted format in a SAM file, ‘C://Windows/System32/Config/SAM’.
2. When you log in, that file is in use. So even if you try, you can’t open it and see its contents. So to hack this password, we need to use some other Operating System, not Windows.
3. When you first enter your password, say it is ‘rw050291’, it is encrypted and stored as ‘dasjn32640502167524433’ in the SAM file.
   The next time you log in, Windows doesn’t check your password as ‘rw050291’ = ‘rw050291’.
   When you click login, your password is encrypted and it checks if
   ‘dasjn32640502167524433’ = ‘dasjn32640502167524433’ (Because SAM file stores your password in encrypted form and not the original text)
4. XP uses LM hash (LanMan hash) and not md5 hashing algorithm.
   Md5 is a one-way encryption.  That is every time, ‘rw050291’, will be encrypted to ‘dasjn32640502167524433‘.
   But you can’t decrypt ‘dasjn32640502167524433‘ to ‘rw050291‘.
   That is ‘rw050291‘ (password) —> ‘dasjn32640502167524433‘ (md5 hash) is possible, but decryption of ‘dasjn32640502167524433‘ to get ‘rw050291‘ is not possible
   But in LM Hash, it is possible. You can decrypt the hash to find the the original text and Ophcrack uses this to crack passwords.

We will be using brute force attack to hack windows XP password. For this, we will need Ophcrack. Ophcrack is a Live OS, which has inbuilt Rainbow tables. While brute-forcing your Password, these tables are used . Brute-force is an attack where the program/attacker tries every possible combination of words and letters with the password and shows the one which matches with password.

You can download Ophcrack from here. Download the Live OS version.

So let’s check out the step to get your forgotten XP password or hack it.

1. Boot your machine from Ophcrack.
   

   Boot from Ophcrack

    

2. Select Ophcrack Graphic Mode.
   

   Select first option.

    

3. This is what you’ll see when you your desktop comes. Delete those accounts for which you don’t need the password. Only keep the accounts which you want to hack.
   

   Delete unwanted accounts from the list.

    

4. Select the account and click crack.
   

   Select account and click crack.

5. Check the NT password column for your password 🙂
   

   Your password.