A couple of weeks ago I saw someone mention a little script called BozoCrack on Twitter and I decided to check it out. What caught my attention is that BozoCrack simply “cracks” md5 hashes by doing a search on Google for that hash. Once it finds the hash and the text that goes with it, it spits it back out on the screen. Not really cracking of course, but its pretty dang effective.
Here is the description that Juuso Salonen, the author, gave it.
“BozoCrack is a depressingly effective MD5 password hash cracker with almost zero CPU/GPU load. Instead of rainbow tables, dictionaries, or brute force, BozoCrack simply finds the plaintext password. Specifically, it googles the MD5 hash and hopes the plaintext appears somewhere on the first page of results.
It works way better than it ever should.”
Here’s a quick test run of the script. I did a small list with the following passwords in it.
foobar
password
letmein!
password1234
wtfbbqftw
Save that as md5-list.txt and ran BozoCrack against it. My results came back in a just couple of seconds.
> ruby bozocrack.rb md5-list.txt
Loaded 5 unique hashes
3858f62230ac3c915f300c664312c63f:foobar
5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99:password
2a5de0f53b1317f7e36afcdb6b5202a4:letmein!
bdc87b9c894da5168059e00ebffb9077:password1234
I didn’t get “wtfbbqftw” this time, but who knows it may show up in future Google searches. This is a dead simple script, a great idea and WAY more effective than it should be.
Here’s the link to download it. BozoCrack
Cracking MD5 Passwords with BozoCrack
Paul Asadoorian
Paul Asadoorian is currently the Principal Security Evangelist for Eclypsium, focused on firmware and supply chain security awareness. Paul’s passion for firmware security extends back many years to the WRT54G hacking days and reverse engineering firmware on IoT devices for fun. Paul and his long-time podcast co-host Larry Pesce co-authored the book “WRTG54G Ultimate Hacking” in 2007, which fueled the firmware hacking fire even more. Paul has worked in technology and information security for over 20 years, holding various security and engineering roles in a lottery company, university, ISP, independent penetration tester, and security product companies such as Tenable. In 2005 Paul founded Security Weekly, a weekly podcast dedicated to hacking and information security. In 2020 Security Weekly was acquired by the Cyberrisk Alliance. Paul is still the host of one of the longest-running security podcasts, Paul’s Security Weekly, he enjoys coding in Python & telling everyone he uses Linux.
