Twitter Words of Interest

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When attempting to crack passwords custom word lists are very useful additions to standard dictionaries. An interesting idea originally released on the "7 Habits of Highly Effective Hackers" blog was to use Twitter to help generate those lists based on searches for keywords related to the list that is being cracked. I've expanded this idea into twofi which will take multiple search terms and return a word list sorted by most common first.

A second option, suggested by @pentest4dummies, was to look at what specific users have been saying and use their own tweets to build up the list so I've added that as well. Given a list of twitter usernames the script will bring back approximately the last 500 tweets for each user and use those to create the list.

Download

Download twofi version 2.0-beta
Download twofi version 1.0

Installation

The only ruby gem that probably isn't installed by default is the twitter one, to install this run:

bundle install

ruby twofi.rb

or making it executable then running it directly

chmod a+x twofi.rb
./twofi.rb

Version 1 of Twofi used the now removed Twitter search feature which did not require any authentication. Version 2 now uses the new API which requires you to have a Twitter account and apply for API keys. The process is simple and instant, no cash, no waiting for human approval, so no big deal. You need to go to https://apps.twitter.com/ and fill in your details. This will give you a pair of keys which you then need to put into the twofi.yml config file.

At the moment the script expects the config file to be in the same directory as twofi is being ran from, if this is not the case you can tell it where the config file is by using the --config parameter.

Then you can run twofi by either using ruby

ruby twofi.rb

or making it executable then running it directly

chmod a+x twofi.rb
./twofi.rb

Usage

Usage: twofi [OPTIONS]
    --help, -h: show help
    --count, -c: include the count with the words
    --config <file>: config file, default is twofi.yml
    --min_word_length, -m: minimum word length
    --term_file, -T <file>: a file containing a list of terms
    --terms, -t: comma separated search terms
        quote words containing spaces, no space after commas
    --user_file, -U <file>: a file containing a list of users
    --users, -u: comma separated usernames
        quote words containing spaces, no space after commas
    --verbose, -v: verbose

Usage is fairly simple, you can specify search terms or usernames either on the command line as comma separated lists or through files which you pass in. If you are specifying the terms or users on the command line you cannot have a space between the comma and the words, i.e. this is good:

term1,term2,term3

and this is bad:

term1, term2, term3

This is because of the way the command line arguments are parsed, the space is taken to mean a new parameter.

If you are using files each term/username should be on its own line.

When specifying usernames you do not need the @ symbol, if you pass it it will be stripped off when used anyway so save yourself some typing.

The --count option allows you to request the number of times each word is used. This might help if you only have a limited number of attempts to use the words and so need to decide which are really worth trying.

At the moment there is nothing for the script to be verbose about so the verbose flag does nothing. I've included it for future versions.

Change Log

• 2.0-beta - Updated to use the new authenticated API
• 1.0 - Initial release

Todo

My next plan is to scrape both the general timeline and try to automate scraping trending topics. This would allow a word list of "current" words to be generated which would probably include a lot of slang and new words that aren't inlcuded in standard dictionaries.