Recovering ADSL passwords

Lost and forgotten passwords can be really tiresome when you realize you cannot retrieve them anymore. This can be the situation if you have a forgotten ADSL account password -- you can set a new one anytime, but often you are not permitted to know the old one.

Broadband and cable connections that use ADSL technology often uses a pair of user name and password strings to authenticate the end user to connect to the Internet. This password is stored inside the ADSL router and can be modified using the router configuration pages. The trouble comes when we forget the password we had set there, and we want to retrieve it. All we can see is a set of asterisks (*) in the password field, and there really exists no "Lost my password" link.

A week or so before I was asked by a friend of mine to retrieve a lost password of an ADSL broadband connection. The guy had accidentally messed up the router configuration and wanted to reset it using built-in hardware reset switch. But unfortunately he had forgotten the ADSL password he set in the configuration. Retrieving it from the ISP was troublesome, so said he, for he had to go through a set of formalities and paperwork. I couldn't really find any useful utility on the Internet for the purpose and hence decided to write one of my own.

Well that's how the adslpwd utility was born. Its now hosted on a site of its own. Lastest versions, bugfixes and patches will all be uploaded to its site. So make sure you check out the site and have a latest copy before attempting any recovery procedure. The site URL is given below.

http://www.adslpwd.web1000.com/

If the site seems offline (it does! the free site provider seems to have downtime), you can download the file directly from my FileAnchor account. Click here to download if the site is offline.

The utility is made to work with Microsoft Windows operating system only. If you are a linux or unix user, check out this post. Its on how to recover the ADSL router password using a small shell script.

So for Windows users, the rest of this post will guide you through installation and usage of the adslpwd utility.


Example of a (lost) PPPoE password screen

Above shown is a screenshot taken from an ADSL router configuration page. The user name for PPPoE connection is set as 'ubercoder'. The password is shown as asterisks.

It should be possible for one to easily get the password at this point by right clicking the web page and choosing view source, and then searching for the word "user name" or "password". But that's for the slightly-advanced user! The utility was made for the novice user who finds it tough to open up the router configuration and dig through pages and analyze html source. The utility automates the task, by exercising the telnet interface of the router.

Installation of adslpwd utility

First you need to download the latest copy of adslpwd from here. Its a zipped archive containing a single executable file. Here's a screenshot of the contents of the ZIP archive after extraction.


Now just double clicking the adslpwd.exe would run the utility. It will give you the following screen, prompting you to enter the router IP address, login user name and password. Enter your router user name and password here and press Recover. The most common values are given by default. The default user name and password for most routers available are admin/admin. If you have not changed it by yourself, this should work.

The screenshot below shows the opening screen of adslpwd utility.



What this utility does is that it connects to the telnet interface of your router available at the specified address (i.e., port 23), and attempt to download a configuration dump. Once this configuration dump file is received from the router, it parses the output line by line to match ADSL account user name and password. The program outputs the matched lines to the status window. It takes only one or two minutes to connect download and parse the configuration and find the password. When I perform the recovery on my router, I get the following output (Of course, the password shown below was set solely for this article!).


That's it. The utility was tested on various broadband routers based on ADSL technology. I'm not sure about all the routers available out there. If you were able to recover your lost password using this utility, please post a comment indicating your ISP, router manufacturer and model name so that it proves useful to others. Good luck!