Guy's Best Practice Ezine 154 - Free Security Tools

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Guy's Best Practice Ezine 154 - Free Security Tools

Neither computer security nor physical house security come naturally to me. Therefore, I am most grateful to Paul DeBrino for pointing me to interesting security tools at NirSoft.

I found these free security utilities fascinating at two levels. Firstly, one day I may be locked out of an application and need help in getting one of my forgotten passwords. In passing, I wonder if internet sites where I register my details, use similar technology to send me a password that I cannot remember.

Secondly, on the rare occasions when I do put on my 'security hat', I am curious to know which utilities could attack my applications. In this scenario, I am relieved when the password cracking tools fails on my up-to-date applications, but slightly concerned if it works.

NirSoft's Security Tools

IE PassView v1.10
IE PassView is a utility that reveals the passwords stored by Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0. Incidentally, PasswordFox v1.10 performs similar password recovery for Mozilla Firefox.

To show how up-to-date nirsoft are, they have just released ChromePass v1.00 for Google's now Chrome browser.

Protected Storage PassView v1.63
This utility can read data stored in Protected Storage and thus can reveal passwords stored on your computer by Outlook Express and POP3 accounts including Outlook.

LSASecretsView v1.13
LSASecretsView lists the LSA secrets stored in the Registry on your computer. This data is stored under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policy\Secrets. Examples include AutoAdminLogon and VPN passwords.

WirelessKeyView v1.18
WirelessKeyView recovers wireless network keys (WEP/WPA) stored in your computer by the 'Wireless Zero Configuration' service of Windows XP and by the 'WLAN AutoConfig' service of Windows Vista. It allows you to easily save all keys to text/html/xml file, or copy a single key to the clipboard.

You are going to find this hard to believe, but there are another 10 password recovery utilities at the nirsoft site. They cover programs such as MSN Messenger, Remote Desktop, some versions of Access and SQL.

See details of NirSoft's free security utilities

Tools4Ever - Network Utilities

For general network utilities try Tools4Ever. They have a professional stable of products for example, SpaceGuard Disk quota manager, Self Service Password Reset, and my favourite FreePing. Tools4Ever use the popular internet utility model where we download a trial version, and if we like it, we return and buy the full version.

Check out the network utilities from Tools4Ever.

Summary of Free Security Tools

There are two situations where you may need security tools to reveal passwords, you may be frustrated at forgetting a password, or you may wish to test your applications against freely available security cracking tools.

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Guy Recommends: WMI Monitor and It's Free!

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of the hidden treasures of Microsoft operating systems.

Fortunately, Solarwinds have created the Free WMI Monitor so that you can actually see and understand these gems of operating system information. Take the guess work out of which WMI counters to use for scripts.

Download your free copy of WMI Monitor

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