Cracking My Own Reddit Password(haseebq.com) |
Cracking My Own Reddit Password(haseebq.com) |
That being said, it was pretty clever to take advantage of an enumeration attack on another service that wasn't protecting against enumeration attacks on the feature because frankly, why would they?
No. I went in expecting it to be about a guy who lost his own password to Reddit and had to crack it.
Spoiler: That's what the article was about.
This article, while interesting, is really just about general password cracking.
"Is there an F in your password? Yes, you have one F, now guess again..."
But to get on topic: This was one of my favorite ways of recovering passwords when I had a blind SQL injection somewhere. I wrote a nice perl script that brute forced (yes the guy in the article also brute forced) the field through the SQL substr command. Happy, simpler times :)
The article is a subversive ad for http://lettermelater.com and little more.
It turns out (due to repeated chars) to only have 14 unique chars. This single run through would have reduced the alphabet size (A, in the article) from 36 to 14. The 432 iterations becomes 168.
I'm sure there are other optimisations I'm missing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14108223 (17 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14076918 (20 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14071188 (21 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14054289 (23 days)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14051671 (24 days)
None have any comments, very few upvotes, so maybe it's worth another chance. Personally, I found it unreadable. I'm sure others will find it fascinating and be able to get past the IN YOUR FACE style and flashing graphics.
Oh, and FWIW, I didn't downvote you.
Technically he didn't guess the password to any specific service, he just happened to have stored his own Reddit password in plaintext as the body of a draft email. The email service allows you to search within the body even if your message is "hidden" from their interface. At worst, he MacGyvered a feature of their service to recover a string he couldn't remember.
This was a coding exercise, nothing more. If he had stored his Reddit password in some obfuscated/encrypted format behind another password-protected service, he likely would not have pulled off this stunt.