One step easier password guessing on Windows

From: NP-completer (npcompleterat_private)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 04:41:50 PDT

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    Hi,
    
    Microsoft's IE has a feature of storing login passwords for future use. With
    (at least) IE 6 on Win2k SP3 (as well as others, see below,) if you see the
    login screen with <input
    type="password"...> tag, and the cached password apears as astrisks, if you
    stand at the beginning of the string and Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow to select
    the whole string, if the password contains any delimiters (i.e. spaces
    colons, commas,...etc.) the selection will stop before it. That means that
    the next char is a delimiter. One might say, "why bother? Snadboy's
    Revelation will give me the cleartext password!" Well, this might be true
    with IE, but the same thing is with apps built with Java (tested on JDK 1.3)
    which Revelations doesn't reveal. By knowing the existence of a delimiter,
    and the number of chars, and some social engineering sense, one may guess
    the password.
    Example 1: Many poeple use dates as their passwords, they usually meet the
    regex '^([0-9]{1,2}[\/\-\.]){2}[1-9]{2,4}$', this means that if you can find
    that the password pattern meet the previous pattern, easier guessing/brute
    forcing can be done.
    Example 2: Some people tend to use their full name, so a single seperator
    between two parts with the same number of characters of victim's full name
    meen even easier gussing.
    I haven't tested on *NIX yet.
    
    Tested on:
    =======
     * Internet Explorer 6 (On Win2k Pro SP3)    =====> Vulnerable
     * Netscape Navigator (On Win2k Pro SP3)  =====> Not Vulnerable
     * Mozilla (On Win2k Pro SP3)                      =====> Not Vulnerable
     * Opera 6.02 (On Win2k Pro SP3)               =====> Vulnerable
     * Java based applications/applets (JDK 1.3)  =====> Vulnerable
     * Visual C++ 6 (MFC 4.2) appications         =====> Not Vulnerable
     * Visual Basic 6 applications                         =====> Not Vulnerable
    
    Peace
    NP-completer
    XEgypt.org
    



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