Daily Cup of Tech has a great article on using the security tool Cain & Abel to recover passwords over the network. Why is this useful you may ask? Well, every time my mother asks me for help with her email and I ask “what is your password”, she responds with “I don’t know. They set that up when it was installed”. Using this tool, I can sniff her network and figure out what password was used when “they” set it up. It can also be useful for doing a security audit on your network to make sure you aren’t sending critical passwords in the clear. Be careful though, Cain & Abel has the ability to be used for unscrupulous purposes, and some Anti-Virus/Spyware/Malware programs may bark at you if they find it on your system (as well as some IT and Network admins).
