naive-hashcat VS CyberChef

For this, I downloaded wordlists such as the rockyou wordlist and used tools such as Hashcat and John the ripper.

For decrypting the .cap file, we've different techniques. We'll use simple technique using aircrack-ng only. It'll help us crack the password using a wordlist. You can use rockyou.txt wordlist which is most commonly used & is updated on regular basis.

First, any sort of password that uses an actual word (English or otherwise) has a far greater chance of being cracked. This is due to the fact that common password lists (e.g. the rockyou list) contain millions of unique entries from sites around the web. Many people share a favorite animal or plant as well, so unless your favorite animal is something unique like Mustela erminea there's a good chance that it's an entry in a list somewhere.

Most of the time a DB of hashed passwords is leaked/stolen and the attacker has unlimited attempts to brute force that. What's also commonly done is that they run it against dictionaries (and there are some pretty good dictionaries for that and some of them are easily accessible online) and if the DB is large enough, they're practically guaranteed to get hits immediately.

Looking at the GitHub page for naive hashcat, it appears as though it only takes at most three arguments. Is there a reason you're using it over regular hashcat?

First, it is important to know how the process works. Hashing is a process essentially different from encryption - you can only do it once. It means that we cannot really recover the plaintext of a hashed password; instead, we can only compare its hash with our guesses. So, it's like hashing several words and seeing which of them matches exaclty our hash. Then, it must be the password. We can automatize this process with two tools: hashcat and a dictionary of potential passwords. This kind of dictionary is easy to find on internet, so we are going to use rock you.

I use only SecLists (https://github.com/brannondorsey/naive-hashcat/releases/download/data/rockyou.txt)

rainbow table ("dictionary") plaintext or broken list of common passwords (i.e. Rockyou) leaked from many sources ^ those give you an idea of what people think are "clever" passwords

It's important to choose strong passwords. That's because there are lists of millions passwords like rockyou.txt which can be used to brute force your Linux system using hydra.

Then we take the encrypted text and use CyberChef to decrypt it.

Let's go to CyberChef and insert our pieces of evidence.

A parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time.

I don't think this was a hostile action by Google, I think someone just added better input validation for security reasons and it accidently broke the bad requests they were sending.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...

❗This is indeed the flag, but the text is encrypted with Base64. Usually, the presence of padding character "=" indicates that's Base64 type of encoding (but that's only one of the hints). To decrypt it, we can use CyberChef. Copy-paste the text and we either:

It uses a combination of magic bytes (like the `file` command), entropy analysis and character frequency detection to determine whether an output is likely to be of interest to the user.

The file type mechanism is written here[0]. There's a list of all signatures we detect here[1].

[0] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F...

I think this can be deciphered using CyberChef...