Although modern computer users are much more advanced than the first users of old systems, not everyone knows what a hash, hash tag, hash sum is and what is the decryption of the hash for (including online). As it turns out, everything is much simpler than it might seem at first glance.
What is hash encryption?
Based on the official definition, the hash is a string with a fixed length that corresponds to some data (including confidential) in encrypted form.
This technique is applied mainly to logins and passwords using the algorithms MD5, NTLM, SHA-160 and derivatives based on them. The most common is the MD5 algorithm. The data encrypted with its help, especially long passwords, containing not only letters and numbers, but also special characters, to decrypt using the standard method of selection is hopeless (although some programs and online services can decrypt short passwords).
Why hash decryption needed
Many users may naturally wonder how much this is necessary. However, the mistake of this approach is that they do not understand that they can forget the password for some service, service or program after encryption, so that no unauthorized person could recognize it, so to speak, in its purest form.
Recovering a password or login is sometimes impossible. And if you look at the basics of cryptography, here the hash decryption will be needed. In essence, this procedure is a recreation of the original combination of modified data.
This process is rather laborious. For example, to the word “man”, the combination encrypted using the MD5 algorithm looks like e3447a12d59b25c5f850f885c1ed39df. And these are just seven letters in the original word. What then to speak of longer passwords containing numbers or special characters, and even entered case-sensitive! Nevertheless, some applications and online services containing huge databases for most possible combinations can be decrypted. True, it’s not always successful (it all depends on the initial combination), but in most cases they won’t be denied effectiveness, although they use brute force technique (brute force).
Program for decrypting a password hash
One of the most powerful programs is considered to be the online application Hash Killer ("Hash Killer") from British programmers. Its database contains about 43.7 million known combinations of pairs.
The only drawback is that passwords containing Cyrillic characters are not displayed correctly in default encoding. But, as it is believed, the decoding of the hash in Latin is done instantly. According to statistics, the approximate time to decrypt three of the five simple passwords is half a second.
In addition, all sorts of contests are constantly held on the official resource of developers with the participation of everyone. And they, in turn, as it turns out, are sometimes able to issue rather unconventional solutions.
Decoding the hash with the utility of John The Ripper looks no less interesting. It works quite fast, but the main drawback is that all the functions of the program can be used exclusively from the command line, which simply scares away many users.
Online Decryption Services
In principle, in order not to install software, you can use online services for decrypting NT hashes of passwords or any other type of data.
Such online resources are not always free. In addition, many of them do not contain as large databases as we would like. But algorithms like MD5 or encryption using MySQL, for the most part, they recreate elementary. In particular, this applies to the simplest combinations consisting of numbers.
But you should not flatter yourself, since such services do not always determine the decryption technique automatically. That is, if encryption was performed using the base64 encode algorithm, the user must set the corresponding decode parameter himself. In addition, do not forget that there may be cases with unknown encoding, when decrypting the online hash becomes impossible at all.
Instead of an afterword
What is the best solution is hard to say. Some users advise installing the Stirlitz application, which is mainly designed to decrypt passwords consisting of Cyrillic characters based on the binhex, base64, BtoA, xxencode, uuencode algorithms, etc. But even in this case, a complete guarantee of success cannot be given.
Finally, before decoding, you should first pay attention to the combination itself. If it looks like unreadable characters, decryption may not be necessary (you just need to change the encoding). Otherwise, if such actions are really needed, it is better to resort to the help of special utilities described above, rather than using Internet resources on which the hash decryption is offered online.