Passwords are perhaps
the weakest links in the cyber-security chain; if they're complex enough
to be secure, you probably won't be able to remember them. Add the fact
that every other site seems to require a password, and it's easy to see
why far too many people end up using one or two simple passwords that
are easy to remember, and easy to crack, too. You can write your
passwords down on a piece of paper that you can look for and fail to
find when you need it, or you can download and install G&G's
Password Cracker. It's a tiny, free, totally portable utility that can
recover lost passwords from applications.
Password Cracker
downloads as a compressed file but runs as soon as you click the
unzipped program file. The tool's interface is a tiny dialog, about the
size of the average error message, with two text fields, labeled Test
and View, and four buttons: Enable, Options, About, and Help. Other than
some links to the program's Web site and some of the developer's other
wares, that's it. However, the button's labels describe their functions
clearly enough, so we started by checking the options, which are
minimal, with check boxes to recover passwords in Internet Express or
all of Windows. We checked the latter, opened a browser window, and
navigated to a site that required a password log-in. We clicked Enable,
hovered the mouse cursor over the password field (as delineated by
asterisks), and Password Cracker displayed the alphanumeric password in
the View field. We repeated the process with a Windows program that
requires a log-on to open, with the similar success. The always-on-top
option is handy since it keeps the little dialog from getting lost in a
stack of open windows.
