“Malevolence is a simple application created by Marukka which extracts login/password information from the system in a unshadowed format. It has been discovered there a numerous ways to obtain the passwd information from netinfo (see next blog post for more info) including simply typing the command command “nidump passwd .” ” see http://www.securemac.com/malevolence.php for more info.
Which is a nice way of getting a list of where to find passwords:
Luke:~ Luke$ nidump passwd
usage: nidump [-r] [-T timeout] {directory | format} [-t] domain
known formats:
aliases
bootptab
bootparams
ethers
exports
fstab
group
hosts
networks
passwd
printcap
protocols
resolv.conf
rpc
services
Once you have the encrypted password file it may be decrypted with a method referred to as cracking or using a brute-force. Handy for admin who have a locked down system with important data inside due to loss of password, or other carelessness.
To make life easier for system administrators you can use Malevolence to save a bit of time.
Download:
It will even allow you to do this if you do not have the proper privileges to do so. Malevolence is very easy to use, in either Terminal.app or though a telnet session just run Malevolence and it will create a file called “index.html” in the same directory as Malevolence. Then just open up the web browser of your choosing and view the index.html file that Malevolence created.
Feel free to check http://www.msec.net for updates to Malevolence.And as always, this is not a hackers site! – this information is targeted at system administrators and academics wishing to learn about the latest in system security to be able to protect or recover their systems. So please use responsibly!
