Difference between Crack and Original Windows

In keeping with the current technology, everybody is dependent on technology. And a big part of this technology is the computer. An operating system is needed to make the computer workable. There are many types of operating systems for our use. Before the discussion of Original and Crack windows, we need to learn about the operating system.

Operating System

At one time the computer was required to create a separate program for the computer to do certain tasks. And for every such type of program, you had to add several things to the program when you created the program, for example, you are pressing a «key» on the keyboard to read, store data in memory, retrieve data, and how the program works see the display. And these things had to be added to the program for each separate job. And it was a little more difficult than usual. Operating System was released to solving this problem.

The operating system is a computer’s core software, which controls your computer’s input, output, storage, etc. It is the short form of OS. You can think of the operating system as a controller of other software/applications running on your computer. Where all the software or applications work under the operating system, and the operating system will look after what this software is doing. Again the operating system controls everything, it’s wrong.

«The operating system is again dependent on the BIOS (BIOS-Basic Input Output System). BIOS helps the operating system to relate to hardware and software such as the kernel. Bios is not a software, it is built with every computer’s hardware chip, called firmware. All types of operating systems and kernels work on different types of computers and are separated by the hardware model of the BIOS computer and the manufacturing company.»

To keep pace with technology and to make our tasks easier and nicer, there are many operating systems. One of the most popular operating systems in the Windows operating system. Windows is a Microsoft flagship operating system that we have been using for personal and business purposes. This is a graphical operating system. In the year 1985, Microsoft introduced the Windows operating system as an additional benefit of their Disk Operating System (DOS), and since then many versions of Windows have been released, due to the increasing interest of people towards the graphical operating system. And so far it has been widely used on personal or desktop computers.

Windows versions are:

• Windows 1.0
• Windows 2.0
• Windows 3.0
• Windows 95
• Windows 98
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Windows 7
• Windows 8
• Windows 8.1
• Windows 10

On August 18, 2015, Microsoft released Windows 10 as its last operating system to the market. After that gradually Microsoft brought the next versions of Windows 10 to the market. The last update of Windows 10 was the version 1809 which was released on October 2, 2018, in the market. But since the beginning, the price of each of Microsoft’s products had been quite out of the reach of the common man, and from there the origins of the crack. Crack means using something illegally.

Most of the users of computer use the crack version of Windows only because of its high price. And some users are using windows with buying the license. But if you look carefully, there is no difference between the original Windows and the crack Windows. Now you can imagine if there is no difference in looking between original and crack windows, then what is the need to buying windows for use? And those who are buying windows, why those doing it?

Crack Windows

• Cracking Windows is a completely illegal use of Windows. Steal windows for using.
• Crack Windows is activated with some software created by hackers, such as KMS, Windows Activator, and Re-loader etc.
• Crack is the biggest problem in Windows, it can hang at any time, and may cause distractions in your work.
• Crack Windows program files may be missing at any time, and it is unlikely that the instant missing file will be downloaded because the hackers are connected to the server.
• Crack Windows users get Microsoft’s latest updates very late. If the device drivers are not instantly updated, then the PC becomes slow. New trouble is created in the workplace.
• Crack Windows may require the use of antivirus to keep your computer free from viruses because crack antivirus cannot work properly in Windows. And due to the use of extra antivirus, your computer will become slower.
• Since cracked Windows are activated by hackers, so undoubtedly all the databases in your computer are insecure. Hackers can grab your data at any time according to their practice.

Now many people can say or think that I have been using crack Windows for many years, but I do not have any problem. I just want to say them, maybe when you activated the crack with the tools created by Windows Hacker, your computer had been added to the hackers’ personal server, without adding to your Microsoft server. And the updates that you are getting, and maybe coming from the hackers’ server.

Original Windows

• If you buy a windows license from Microsoft officially for your using purpose, then you’re an original windows user.
• Original Windows is activated with the legitimate product key purchased from Microsoft. And to fully verify it, you have to activate it using Online Product Keys.
• Original Windows is not likely to be down anytime. Original Windows can be down when your computer hardware has a problem.
• For various reasons cracks are similar to Windows, so many files are missing in the original Windows, but it is much less than a crack. And if you’re missing files in the original Windows, you can’t understand and many times, because it is connected to Microsoft’s server, the missing files are automatically downloaded and installed.
• Original Windows users get the latest updates of Microsoft as soon as they are released. And the new device drivers update makes the computer work much faster.
• Original Windows is activated by Microsoft’s official serial key, and for this reason, it does not have to worry about data security.

At last, I want to say that, we use a lot of software on our computer. And the maximum software is paid. If you want to get all of those features, then you must be buying a license. Otherwise, you will be able to that software for 7 or 30 days. It’s called the trial version of the software. And the trial version will not allow you to use all features. This alternative version is crack version.

If you want, you can easily download the crack version of your software from the internet, such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, and much other essential software must be important for your work. But the problem is that whenever you use the Crack version, you undoubtedly have to think that your computer is in control of someone else and it is in bigger trouble. From now on, think of what you will use!

We (Toshost) provide original Windows, Microsoft Office Package and many other important tools and software for our clients. Those are officially authorized. If you want to get Windows, Office Package and any other software at an affordable price, you can contact us.

Crack­ing Win­dows 10 Account Pass­word: Is it Still Pos­si­ble? How to Pre­vent it?

Ajinkya Bhamburkar

31 Dec 2016

Digital Security is paramount today. Anything with an internet connection is vulnerable and can be compromised by someone sitting on a different continent. The latest DDOS attack on DNS servers is one example of many such wide scale attacks which are on increasing trend since last few years.

Windows Account are secure is a myth my friend | shutterstock

Your PC or Laptop is also not secure from such attacks. While you may reiterate that I have password protected it, but that’s not enough today, as we will see.

The Hackers USB Drive

In a recent video, Linus of LinusTechTips, famous among the tech & geek circles, demoed how this plain looking USB drive can unlock your Windows account easily within minutes. Available for $20 on Amazon, this drive, known as Password Reset Key(PRK), aimed for resetting your password in case you forget it, is just waiting to be misused.

To the layman, it might seem that some revolutionary new technology is at work, but in reality it’s nothing more than some software trickery. But in this day & age, with Windows advanced so much with 10, how is this even be possible? To understand that we need to learn how Windows account security works.

The Weak Part: Windows Account Security

From a very long time, Window’s way of storing user account password has been criticized. Windows stores all the user account passwords in a SAM(Security Account Manager) database file. For obvious reasons the passwords are not stored as plain text and the file is inaccessible when the OS running. Hashing, a one way function, is used to convert your password into a string of characters of fixed length so that in case someone grabs the SAM file(which is easier than you think), the passwords cannot be known. The hashing methods used by Windows are the reason of criticism. These methods are explained below.

LM Hashing & NTLM Hashing

LM hashing is a very old method of Windows 95-era and is not used today. In this method the password is converted into hash using the step-by-step method shown below.

The (outdated) process

The inherent process of breaking down your password in two 7-character strings, made LM hashing vulnerable to brute force attacks. This was improved by the NTLM method which used the more complex MD4 hashing technique. While this solved the earlier problem it was still not secure enough because of Rainbow Tables.

Rainbow Tables

Till now we learnt what hashing is and it’s one important property is that it’s one-way. Which means brute forcing a hash will not yield the original password back. So this is where rainbow tables come into picture. A Rainbow Table is a literal table which contains pre-generated hashes for all possible password combinations for a given hash function.

This table from Nick Brown’s site shows how much Rainbow Tables have progressed.

For example if a password has a rule that it can consist of 7 characters from 26 alphabets & 10 numbers 0-9 only, then through permutations we have 42072307200!! possible combinations for it. A rainbow table for this function will contain hashes & the corresponding password for every possible combination. But the downside of rainbow tables is that they get very big when the input size & password length increases.

As shown above, a simple rainbow table for LM hashing function of Windows XP is 7.5 GB in size. Tables of modern hash functions which use alphabets, numbers & symbols can be of multi hundred gigabytes. So these are not easy to process and use for a normal user with a desktop PC.

There are online websites which offer pre-complied rainbow tables for the Windows Hash function for a price as well as provide lookup tables to check a hash.

So someone who has a Windows SAM file can run a lookup for the hash in a pre-computed table and find the password(if it’s relatively simple). And this is possible because of one drawback of NTLM hashing method of not using salting.

Sadly Windows doesn’t use Salting

Salting is a technique of adding random string of characters to the password before hashing, so that each hash becomes unique, as shown above, defeating the purpose of Rainbow Tables.

The Attack: How It Is Executed

In Windows 10, Microsoft is using NTLMv2 hashing technique, which while doesn’t use salting but fixes some other critical flaws and overall offers more security. But then also you are not cent percent protected, as I will show now how can you perform a similar attack on your own PC.

Recovering your Hashes

First step is to get hashes of your password using any one of the several methods available. I am going to use the freely available Hash Suite 3.4 (formerly known as pwdump). The beauty of this program is that it can grab the hashes even when Windows is running, so you don’t have to mess around with bootable USB drives. Windows Defender may get nauseous while this is running, so turn it off momentarily.

Step 1: Download the free version of Hash Suite from here and extract all the contents of the zip file to a folder.

Step 2: Open the folder and launch the program by selecting Hash_Suite_64 for 64-bit OS or Hash_Suite_32 for 32-bit one.

Step 3: To import hashes click on Import > Local Accounts as shown below. This will load the hashes of all the accounts present on the PC.

Cracking the Hashes

From here on, Hash Suite also provides option for cracking the hashes using dictionary & brute force attacks but those are available only in paid version. So instead we use one of the online services to crack our hashes. Crackstation & OnlineHashCrack are the two sites which I used for the purpose. These sites use combination of pre-calculated tables, dictionary attacks and brute force to crack your hashes.

In my case Crackstation immediately conveyed that it can’t match the hash & OnlineHashCrack took five days time but still couldn’t crack it. Apart from them, there other offline programs such Cain & Abel, JohnTheRipper, OphCrack and more which grab the hashes even over network. But explaining how to use them will turn this article into a BlackHat conference piece.

Note: You can verify whether the hashes extracted by HashSuite are of your account’s password by matching it with the hash generated for your password using any online hash generators.

Your Defense

As we saw grabbing the hashes is so much simple that you don’t have to mess around with bootable drives or complex commands. And there are many other programs which are much more advanced in this regard. So in such case your best defense is password & encryption, which I have expanded in detail below.

Long Password

Starting with the length, a long password is generally considered more secure. But how long is long enough? Researchers say that your password should be at least 12 characters long. But to be on the safer side, a 16+ character password is recommended. And please don’t set it as password12345678. It should be mix of lowercase, uppercase alphabets, numbers & symbols.

Using Encryption

Second line of defense is using encryption. In Windows the encryption key is associated with your Windows Account Password, so even if someone resets the password like in Linus’s video, your stuff will not be accessible. You can use either the inbuilt encryption if you have Pro version of Windows or use any of the third party programs.

Using SYSKEY & Microsoft Account

To prevent unauthorized access, the Windows SAM is stored in an encrypted format. And the encryption key is stored locally on the PC. SYSKEY is an in built Windows utility which allows you move that key to an external media(USB drive) or add one more layer of password before the login. You can learn more about how to set it up here.

Additionally you can also switch to Microsoft account, as the PRK does not work on Microsoft account, as stated by Linus in the video. But I could not verify that as I did not have a PRK to test. But HashSuite was able to extract the Hashes of my Microsoft account’s password, so it is not that effective.

Other Miscellaneous Measures

Apart from the above, you can also set a BIOS password which will add another layer of protection. Also if you don’t like encrypting your whole Windows drive you can set a separate partition which holds all your important stuff, so even if a hacker resets the password, you do not completely lose access to your files.

Using any biometric method of login is one more way to thwart such attacks. Last but not the least, upgrading to Windows 10 is also one way even if it seems little bizarre. Even though it’s vulnerable, it has other security improvements like Windows Hello & Credential Guard.

In Panic Mode? Don’t Be

If you have read the whole post(brave you!) you might be panicky. But there’s one important thing we are over looking here, all this attacks require physical access to your PC. While these attacks are still possible over network, but executing them is not a cup of tea of someone who has learnt hacking from Hacker in a Week type videos. But one should be careful as we always have around some pissed off people (or colleagues) looking to do harm.

And I again reiterate, the method shown here is only for informational purposes. Don’t go trying it on someone else’s PC or try sniffing a public network for hashes. Both the things can land you in trouble. So stay safe & do share your thoughts & doubts through comments.

Last updated on 5 Jul, 2019
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.

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Did You Know

Windows 10 is the last Windows since Microsoft is changing the approach of building and delivering OS.