Once more I had the need to recover a lost password. The tool I used checks each word in a word list to check it as possible password. Since the password was well chosen, the ordinary word lists failed me. The only way left was to use brute force, by guessing all passwords from 00000000 to ZZZZZZZZ.
Brute force is taking very long and for that reason you try to narrow the possible solutions down. A real password will most likely not have the same characters more than 3 times and sometimes there are certain passwords that use patterns, e.g. first character is a letter, or every 2nd char is a vowel. To know this will help to reduce the possible combinations and thus the time needed to crack a password.
Usually I have a good eye for this, but on the other hand I always lacked the tools needed to create my custom needed dictionaries easily. A few days ago I was in that dilemma, knowing the pattern of a password, but not having a tool that was able to create a wordlist for that purpose – as short as possible and thus decided to make a tool of my own.
If at all I am a hobby programmer and the code is not optimized, but so far it works well.
Here is a Screenshot of the little tool Word-Gen:
The strong point of Word-Gen is that each of the characters can easily be configured individually and that results with 1+ occurence of the same characters can be filtered out.
The Tool is slow (you are welcome if you want to improve it), requires .NET Framework 1.1 and still requires some tweaking. I have a good AntiVirus Solution, but in your own interest be cautious with Software you download via the Internet.
Don’t forget that this will create huge word lists – roughly 100k words per second (testrun – 7 digits, 10 mio words, 108 sec, 85 MB). Selecting a large range will require a lot of time and a lot of disk space. There is no progress bar (yet).
You can download it here.