Use CUPP to Generate Password Lists | kali linux | 2017 | latest | villu

Welcome back, my fellow hackers! first a word to my followers: sorry i have been out for awhile, but i had finals, so i had to study. the good news is, I'll be rolling out articles again! and this time, we're going to look at a very nice tool called the Common User Password Profiler (CUPP)

What Is CUPP Exactly?

CUPP is a very powerful tool that creates a wordlist specifically for a person. CUPP is cross platform and written in Python. CUPP asks you questions about the target (name, wife's name, pet's name...) and then creates a password based on the keywords you entered. but how exactly does CUPP work?

humans, no matter how much we think we are unique, show the same patterns when it comes to passwords. we usually pick passwords that are easy to remember, so we take personal things into our passwords. for example, someone could easily remember a password that contains his birthday and the name of his wife. so for example, someone who has a wife named Lucy and was born on 05/07/1978, would have password like "Lucy05071978".
CUPP uses these "algorithms" that are hardwired in humans and exploits them, to generate a very effective wordlist.
i personally find CUPP very effective and it is my personal favorite for when i need to crack a password of a specific person. i once did an experiment with 20 friends to see if their password appeared on the CUPP wordlist after i gave CUPP some info about them, and guess what: 16 of the 20 had their password guessed by CUPP! anyway, enough talk, let's get our hands dirty!

Step 1Fire Up Kali and Git CUPP

our first step is of course to fire up Kali, our beloved hacking system. once we have Kali up and running, we need to make a directory to store our CUPP files in our home directory. so enter this command:
mkdir CUPP
then navigate to that directory

cd CUPP
once inside the CUPP directory, go ahead and enter the following line into your terminal:
git clone https://github.com/Mebus/cupp.git

if git doesn't work, you probably don't have it installed. if so, enter this command:
apt-get update && apt-get install git
if everything goes alright, you should recieve an output like this:

Step 2The Configuration File

like a lot of hacking tools, CUPP also has a configuration file. let's explore and manipulate it's options.
when we use the ls command after gitting CUPP, we can see that a new folder named "cupp" is created. when we navigate in that folder we see the following items:
cupp.py
cupp.cfg
docs which is a directory
README.md you can read this if you are bored.

let's open the configuration with leafpad
leafpad cupp.cfg
we will be greeted with the following screen:

as you can see, there are many settings, but for now, we want to focus on the "1337 mode" and special chars settings.
first, what 1337 mode does is simply go through all the passwords CUPP generated, will replace, for example, a with 4 in that password, and add the new password to the wordlist. this mode makes your wordlist larger, but it increases your chances of success BY TONS. however, we want a to be equal to @ aswell. to do that, simply add this line under "leet".
a=@

next up the special characters. these characters will also be added randomly at the end of the passwords generated by CUPP. i will not edit these, but if you want to, you can simply add a character to it. the other settings are quite self explanational.

Step 3Using CUPP

now, we'll finally start using CUPP. start CUPP in interactive mode by invoking this command:
python cupp.py -i

here you will need to enter all the info of your target. you can get this info by doxing your target. but as an example, my "target" will be John Smith, he is an electrician, born on 05/10/1987, and goes by the nickname "Tirrian". he has a wife named Barbara, but we don't know her nickname. we know his wife is born on 14/07/1989. he also has a son named Alex, we also don't know his nickname, but we know his son was born on 19/03/2005. we also know he has a dog named Laika and he owns a company named ElectricFab. (no copyright infringement intended if this fictional company actually exists.) furthermore we know he is a huge soccer fan and supporter of Real Madrid.
John had to remember his password easily, so he made his password barbara, but replaced the a's with @'s to make it more secure, and he also added the birthday of his wife, which is 14/07, but without the dashes. so his password is:
B@rb@r@1407

take note that this password contains atleast one capital letter, is 8 characters long, has a number in it, and has a special character, which are the minimum norms for passwords on most sites.
(ALSO, take note that JOHN SMITH IS NOT A REAL PERSON! well ok, maybe there is a John Smith, but this one is completely out of my imagination and doesn't exist in real life!)
let's see if CUPP can guess it. enter John's info as followed:

as we can see, CUPP generated a dictionary of 37 thousand possible passwords of John, called John.txt. let's see if we can find his password in the text file.

Step 4Search John.txt for the Password

now, simply open john.txt
leafpad john.txt

once it is opened, click "search" and click on "find". then enter john's password.
guess what? CUPP successfully guessed John's password!

How Can I Protect Myself?

simply don't use a password associated with you. what i personally use to make difficult passwords are "password" sentences. they are extremely difficult to crack, but really easy to remember by you.

first, take a random sentence you can remember, for example: "My girlfriend is ten times more attractive than my Religion teacher!" can be translated to "Mgi10XmatmRt!". that there, is a really good password if you ask me.

for more info on how to protect yourself, have a look at master OTW's tutorial on how to create stronger passwords. (he even explained better than me how to create a passphrase).

that's it for now, folks! i hope you all enjoyed reading the article!

if you need any help or have any questions, feel free to PM me!