Well the good old yellow pages arrived though the letterbox today, pretty weak booklet with a torn front cover. Oh the joys of living in the arse end of civilization and very few companies to adorn the pages with all of there o8oo numbers to use and abuse. More to the point its not exactly outside hours either, so ringing any of them will likely have someone pick up the phone.
Not that having them pick up the phone is a bad thing, but I can’t be arsed with any prank calls at the moment, yes its too hot and I’m impatient to troll though the numbers and I’m certainly not going to head out and roast myself to death in a phone box that reeks of piss while I hammer away at the dial pad.
So, what will I do? Well lets make a start on planning a “theoretical” attack on some poor sods PBX network, my aim as world dominator of the telephone networks will basically consist of totally owning the admin box on a system, or whatever fun can be gleamed from whatever “admin” box has access too.
Now there are many ways in which we can acquire access to admin accounts, the tried and tested method is by brute forcing the password, if we are lucky and the password is a whole 4 digits long then we only have to hammer out 10,000 possible digit combinations, normally if we’re unlucky we’ll get kicked off after 3 failed attempts and have to re-dial into it.
Now one strategy that I have found to be quiet effective for “guessing” these passwords is what a refer to as a “number list” these lists are invaluable for speeding up the time it takes to access these hidden treasures.
Essentially what we are doing is creating a word processor document with about 20 – 30 columns and copying every possible combination of numbers into it and printing it out in tiny font (about size 6)
Now if we assume that your printer isn’t totally shite and in need of new heads / cartridges then its still quiet readable and there’s enough space to mark out each set of digits as you go.
I’m not going to explain to you how to set up a page with multiple columns, that’s your problem, but if your stuck its probably under page set up (try right clicking on the document page), anyhow, once you have set up the page, head over to here:
https://www.random.org/strings/?num=10000&len=4&digits=on&unique=on&format=plain&rnd=new
And pick up your very own unique list of random numbers, hell pick up a few copies while you’re at it.
Copy and paste this string of numbers into your word processor document, you may have to play around with the page, I have noticed that sometimes huge blocks of the page weren’t filling with text, to fix this it was a case of clicking on the offending line and using a combination of delete and space I was able to fill the pages.
Screen shot of LibreOffice spreadsheet
You might find that playing around with the borders will be needed in order to maximize the space available, a few minutes formatting the page and a couple of minutes making sure it looks right and you’re all good to go.
With enough columns (in my case 30) and small (but readable) lines of text with a small font I was able to get it down to 2 – 3 pages, however 4 pages is good, especially if you want to use both sides. try to keep the pages down to a minimum, but at the same time ensure that it is still readable. Now there you have it, a whole list of possible passwords, any one of them will be the key to whatever 4 digit password you are trying to break into, if you’re really lucky then you will get said password somewhere on the first page, preferable the first third of it.
In the event that there is a problem with the random.org URL above, here are three text documents with numbers you can work from.