fgdump

Testing the security of a system or retrieving all the stored passwords from a PC may seem two opposing actions, but in fact they are tied together. This is because the second one should not be easily if at all achievable and this can only be verified properly by performing the first activity.

Grabbing the stored credentials of one or more users that share the same computer can be done in more than one ways and the purpose of a tool like fgdump is to let you see how one of them works so you can avoid being subject to such an attack.

Dumping passwords from a system with this utility requires at least administrator-level access, so at least the access code to the PC should be known. An important thing you have to take into consideration is the fact that fgdump doesn't have a graphical interface, so it can be deployed via command-line and controlled through a set of parameters.

You should note that most antimalware applications will try to stop this kind of procedures due to their nature, so in case you want to run the test on a machine that may have this kind of protection, you should deactivate the real-time guard of your antivirus solution.

A neat thing about fgdump is that if you want to get the job done without going through any configurations and by skipping the selection of any running commands, you can simply run it and it will automatically start a local dump. Otherwise, you can set the number of parallel threads, skip cache dumps, log all output details to file, attempt to shut down antivirus tools, and so on.

On the whole, fgdump may prove to be quite useful but mainly for experienced users who want to assess the level of security for specific machines. However, it doesn't work properly on newer Windows.