eJPT Password Attacks and Credential Testing 2

Question 1

A rainbow table attack is effective because it trades which resource for speed in password cracking?

Accepted Answer

CPU time for storage space

Answer

Rainbow tables pre-compute and store hash-to-plaintext chains, trading disk storage space for dramatically reduced cracking computation time.

Question 2

Which technique adds a random value to a password before hashing to defend against rainbow table attacks?

Accepted Answer

Salting

Answer

Salting appends or prepends a unique random value (salt) to each password before hashing, making pre-computed rainbow tables ineffective.

Question 3

When using Hashcat to crack an NTLM hash, which hash type (-m) value should be specified?

Accepted Answer

-m 1000

Answer

Hashcat uses -m 1000 for NTLM hashes, which are the Windows password hash format stored in the SAM database and NTDS.dit.

Question 4

Which tool can extract NTLM password hashes from a Windows SAM database?

Accepted Answer

Mimikatz

Answer

Mimikatz is a post-exploitation tool capable of dumping NTLM hashes and plaintext credentials from Windows memory and the SAM database.

Question 5

What is a Pass-the-Hash (PtH) attack?

Accepted Answer

Using a captured NTLM hash to authenticate without knowing the plaintext password

Answer

Pass-the-Hash exploits Windows authentication by using a captured NTLM hash directly for authentication, bypassing the need to crack it to plaintext.

eJPT Practice Test