How to Reveal, View Passwords hidden under Asterisks/Stars

Today I’m going to blog about my brush with snooping out hidden passwords, no I’m not going to teach you about Ethical Hacking or Digital Forensics lessons, and it’s just using the available tools hidden in modern day browsers.

The most anticipated Eid Holidays were about to give me a headache, as the internet was too slow and wireless connectivity to my other rooms totally collapsed. No blaming anyone, there were enough signs and symptoms over a year that Etisalat supplied ADSL router Aztech HW550-3G was about to die, I ignored all the signs and waited to be pronounced dead, and it did eventually.

Would you like to see if your router is dying, check these articles.

Signs & Symptoms of a Router Breaking

I quickly grabbed a bundled offer of D-Link Router DIR 600 and Wireless Access Point DAP 116 from local vendor.

 It was time to test my hands on experience on Networking as I was on the verge of collapsing the foundation of connected lifestyle and the dependency on connectivity at home. I was wondering what will happen to the Eid selfie images, images of dress, food and friends, above all numerous whatsapp message to be sent to my friends and family, if I couldn’t connect the internet. Seriously, there were days when we had time to visit friends and relatives, now greeting and wishes are digitalized.

The major hurdle was to recall the ISP supplied password which I never changed from the default, I was hoping my ever dependent Firefox browser would remember it for me, alas, not this time, as 4 plus years was too much even for Firefox to remember. A quick call to the Etisalat call centre, shook me further when the agent politely replied “Sir, you need to visit the nearest business centre with your valid documentation and a fee of 50 AED will be applied in order to recover or reset password”.

Now it was time to put my CSS Skills at test, as I could see within the admin panel of Aztech Router there were some hidden characters under the password field. Bingo, this little CSS knowledge saved my day.

Here is what you should do if you want reveal the password from hidden characters or asterisk

1. Right click on the password field and click on Inspect Element with Firebug / Inspect Element (Chorme and Safari has it’s own versions)
2. Change the type=”password” to type=”text” (see Image) hit enter/return key and bingo, your hidden password will be revealed.

 You can find many other tools on the net to reveal these hidden characters, kindly use them with care, more often these tools, themselves are Trojans and viruses. So do not use them if you are not aware what these applications will do to your system, else you will pay a high price for your ignorance.