If you’re like me you use the built-in functionality of your web browser to save and manage your passwords to various online sites.  If you’re being careful and protecting your passwords from prying eyes you’re using a master password to protect your password list.  What happens if you forget your master password?  Before now you were kind of stuck.  Your passwords would remain safe but inaccessible, rendering them useless.  Now a recovery tool called FireMaster that can help you recover your passwords.

Before I go any further I’d like to remind everyone that these tools can be used for both good and evil.  Please use this to recover a lost password for yourself or someone that asks you, don’t use this to snoop on someone else’s online business.  These tools are a godsend for tech guys, but if people misuse them it just makes it harder for legitimate users to get their hands on them.

FireMaster let’s you ran password recovery using several different methods

You can have it try words out of a dictionary to see if there’s a match.  This is very fast but often times won’t work (because you put a number or special character in your password, right??).

It can try with a brtue force method.  Brute force password cracking is when you guess the password by going through every possible permutation (aaa, aab, aac, aad, and on) until you successfully guess the right one.

The third option is a hybrid mode.  This uses the dictionary method but then adds random characters on top of the basic words (pass123, test987, etc

This can take hours or even days depending on the complexity of your password, so if you remember some basic parameters of your password you can speed things along greatly.  A string such as

FireMaster.exe -q -b -l 8 “pass????” c:\testpath

Would do a brute force scan of the password, however you remember that the password was 8 characters long and started with “pass”  this type of focused scan can literally shave days off a complex password’s scan.

This is worth trying if you need your passwords from Firefox’s password manager.  If you’ve used FireMaster let us know in the comments.

[ securityxploded.com via ghacks.net]