Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

Profiling users for password lists

So far, you have learned how to use passive reconnaissance to collect names and biographical information for users of the target being tested; this is the same process used by hackers. The next step is to use this information to create password lists specific to the users and the target.

Lists of commonly used passwords are available for download, and are stored locally on Kali in the /usr/share/wordlists directory. These lists reflect the choices of a large population of users, and it can be time consuming for an application to attempt to use each possible password before moving on to the next password in the queue.

Fortunately, Common User Password Profiler (CUPP) allows the tester to generate a wordlist ...