From the course: Kali Linux for Advanced Pen Testing and Ethical Hacking
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Obtaining Linux passwords - Linux Tutorial
From the course: Kali Linux for Advanced Pen Testing and Ethical Hacking
Obtaining Linux passwords
- [Instructor] We've looked at how we might obtain Windows passwords. So, let's now look at collecting a Linux target credentials. On a standard Linux system, the user accounts are held in the /etc/password file. We can look at our Kali password file. The password file contains the user ID, the password, the GID or privileged level, a name, and login shell. Notice here the passwords have been replaced with an X. That's because for security reasons, the passwords themselves have been moved to another file called /etc/shadow. The shadow file is not accessible unless we're running with root privileges. As we are, we can take a look at it. I'll scroll back up and we can see that most entries have an asterisk, but the root account has a hexadecimal value in the second field. This is the password hash. I've extracted the set of credentials from a target system. In order to recover the passwords, I need to combine the two…
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