Today’s Dark Tip is one of my favorite password recovery tools for Windows: Cain & Abel. C & A is not your typical local machine password cracker but a network password recovery tool.

C & A combines actual brother applications: Cain recovers the passwords and Abel pulls off the brute force attacks. C & A is different from other password crackers because it acts as a sniffer to intercept and crack passwords in real-time.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard this before right? Well, here are more features.

• Fast and contains APR (ARP poison routing), which enables sniffing on switched LANs by hijacking IP traffic of multiple hosts at the same time.
• Analyzes encrypted protocols such as SSH-1 and HTTPS if used with APR and a man-in-the-middle situation.
• Ships routing protocols authentication monitors and routes extractors, crackers for all common hashing algorithms and for other various specific authentications.
• Works on password calculators, decoders, and other utilities.

I love the ARP cache poisoning feature. It will poision the cache of any host with a false ARP entry allowing it to foward traffic to the destination machine. Leran more about ARP cache poisoning.
This app has a great user interface and works amazingly well. Best of all, it’s completely free.

Download Cain & Abel

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I’ve been needing some time away from school stuff to get the site back in full swing, in fact I’m in class right now, anyways check back later, the updates should be alot more frequent.