There’s a sort of cruel irony to passwords. The legitimate passwords people need to use to access crucial applications or data are often forgotten, and yet the bad guys seem to be able to crack passwords without breaking a sweat. Thankfully, there’s a free tool available that can help you in either of these cases—Cain & Abel.

What is Cain & Abel? It’s described as a Windows-based password recovery tool, but it does much, much more than just password recovery. The software can capture and monitor network traffic for passwords, crack encrypted passwords using various methods, record Voice over IP (VoIP) conversations, recover wireless network keys, and more.

If you’ve forgotten a crucial password, and don’t have any password reset capability in place, you can use Cain & Abel to try and crack the password for you. Cain & Abel can perform a dictionary attack—essentially trying every word in the dictionary—to guess the password. It can also do a brute force attack, which attempts every possible combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols until it finds the right one, or cryptanalysis attacks that attempt to circumvent password encryption techniques. It could take hours, or possibly days, but given enough time Cain & Abel should be able to recover the password for you.

There’s another way to put a tool like Cain & Abel to use for password security. You can run Cain & Abel against your password database to test the strength of your password policies. You might have a password policy in place, but you’d be surprised how easily some passwords that meet the password policy requirements can be cracked.

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