SecurityCipher
Home Blog About Us

Learn Paths, courses, and reference docs

  • ๐Ÿš€ Start Here Beginner path through the site
  • ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Penetration Testing Roadmap Structured path to become a pentester
  • ๐ŸŽ“ Free Security Courses Current free Udemy coupon listings
  • ๐Ÿ“„ Secure Code Explain Vulnerable vs secure code side by side
  • ๐ŸŽฏ Penetration Testing Tricks Field notes for real engagements
  • ๐Ÿ“– Vulnerability Explain How common vulns actually work

Checklists Interactive reviews and LLM risks

  • โœ… Security Checklists Hub All interactive security checklists
  • ๐Ÿ“‹ Writeup Checklists Steps derived from real writeups
  • ๐Ÿง  LLM AI Security Checklist Controls for LLM apps
  • ๐Ÿค– OWASP LLM Top 10 LLM Top 10 risks mapped out
  • ๐Ÿงฐ Burp Suite Guide Step-by-step Burp tutorials
  • ๐Ÿ“˜ Payload Field Manual Safe-first probes and signals

Practice Browser labs, games, and explorers

  • ๐Ÿ”ฌ Interactive Labs SQL injection, AI, architecture review
  • ๐ŸŽฎ Security Games Phishing, JWT, WAF, and more
  • ๐Ÿš— On-Call Drive Neon-city arcade security missions
  • โ€ข Shift Zero SOC desk: phish, OTP, malware, tickets
  • โ“ Application Security Quiz Web, secure coding, and cloud quizzes
  • ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ OWASP Top 10 Explorer Clickable risk map with signals
  • ๐Ÿ”€ Interactive Attack Paths Recon-to-impact chains

Tools & Career Databases, jobs, and community

  • ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Security Tools Curated recon, SAST, and bounty tools
  • ๐Ÿ”Ž CVE Lookup Multi-source CVE intelligence
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ Bug Bounty Programs Live public scopes to search
  • ๐Ÿ’ผ Cybersecurity Jobs Roles from company career pages
  • ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Security Researchers Community profiles and submissions
  • ๐ŸŽค Security Conferences Upcoming and past events
Browse all Security resources hub Freelance Security โ†’
My Resume
Freelance SecurityFreelance
New Security Researchers Join the directory - submit your profile for review Submit profile โ†’
← Security Tools View on GitHub

mimipenguin

Dumps login credentials from memory on Linux desktops.

MimiPenguin 2.0

A tool to dump the login password from the current linux desktop user. Adapted from the idea behind the popular Windows tool mimikatz. This was assigned CVE-2018-20781 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-20781). Fun fact it's still not fixed after GNOME Keyring 3.27.2 and still works as of 3.28.0.2-1ubuntu1.18.04.1.

alt text

Details

Takes advantage of cleartext credentials in memory by dumping the process and extracting lines that have a high probability of containing cleartext passwords. Will attempt to calculate each word's probability by checking hashes in /etc/shadow, hashes in memory, and regex searches. 2.0 introduces a clean C port that aims to increase the speed of execution and portability

Known Issues

  • The 32bit variant of mimipenguin (C build) may fail in a 64bit userspace as it currently does not adequately handle searching a 64bit address space

Requires

  • root permissions

Supported/Tested Systems

  • Kali 4.3.0 (rolling) x64 (gdm3)
  • Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.18.3-0ubuntu2)
  • Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.1 LTS x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.10.1-1ubuntu4.3, LightDM 1.10.6-0ubuntu1)
  • Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 LTS x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.18.3-0ubuntu2)
  • Ubuntu Desktop 16.04.4 LTS x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.18.3-0ubuntu2, LightDM 1.18.3-0ubuntu1.1)
  • Ubuntu 18
  • XUbuntu Desktop 16.04 x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.18.3-0ubuntu2)
  • Archlinux x64 Gnome 3 (Gnome Keyring 3.20)
  • OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 x64 (Gnome Keyring 3.20)
  • VSFTPd 3.0.3-8+b1 (Active FTP client connections)
  • Apache2 2.4.25-3 (Active/Old HTTP BASIC AUTH Sessions) [Gcore dependency]
  • openssh-server 1:7.3p1-1 (Active SSH connections - sudo usage)

Building

  • To Build the C variant release simply run make in the root directory of the project
  • To build a debug binary with debug prints run make debug
  • To build a static linked binaries run make static

Notes

  • Password moves in memory - still honing in on 100% effectiveness
  • Plan on expanding support and other credential locations
  • Working on expanding to non-desktop environments
  • Known bug - sometimes gcore hangs the script, this is a problem with gcore
  • Open to pull requests and community research
  • LDAP research (nscld winbind etc) planned for future

Development Roadmap

  • Implement needles in C port (speed up)
  • Add optional arg to target specific users only (speed up)

MimiPenguin is slowly being ported to multiple languages to support all possible post-exploit scenarios. The roadmap below was suggested by KINGSABRI to track the various versions and features. An "X" denotes full support while a "~" denotes a feature with known bugs.

Feature.sh.py
GDM password (Kali Desktop, Debian Desktop)~X
Gnome Keyring (Ubuntu Desktop, ArchLinux Desktop)~X
LightDM (Ubuntu Desktop)XX
VSFTPd (Active FTP Connections)XX
Apache2 (Active HTTP Basic Auth Sessions)~~
OpenSSH (Active SSH Sessions - Sudo Usage)~~

Contact

  • Twitter: @huntergregal
  • Website: huntergregal.com
  • Github: huntergregal

Licence

CC BY 4.0 licence - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Special Thanks

  • the-useless-one for remove Gcore as a dependency, cleaning up tabs, adding output option, and a full python3 port
  • gentilkiwi for Mimikatz, the inspiration and the twitter shoutout
  • pugilist for cleaning up PID extraction and testing
  • ianmiell for cleaning up some of my messy code
  • w0rm for identifying printf error when special chars are involved
  • benichmt1 for identifying multiple authenticate users issue
  • ChaitanyaHaritash for identifying special char edge case issues
  • ImAWizardLizard for cleaning up the pattern matches with a for loop
  • coreb1t for python3 checks, arch support, other fixes
  • n1nj4sec for a python2 port and support
  • KINGSABRI for the Roadmap proposal
  • bourgouinadrien for linking https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
  • bcoles for adding more needles
  • space-r7 and bcoles for work on the Metasploit MimiPenguin module port
Press Escape to close the search panel.

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Penetration Testing Services

penetration Testing Services

Web Application Security Quiz

Web Application Security Quiz

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Twitter

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Download our Latest Android Application

Guide for Penetration Testing

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Telegram

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Author

Piyush
Senior Product Security Engineer

Ethical Hacker || Penetration Tester || Gamer || Blogger || Product Security Engineer || AI Security

READ ARTICLE

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Recent Posts

  • AI-Generated Code Security Bugs: A Vibe Coding Case Study
    AI-Generated Code Security Bugs: A Vibe Coding Case Study
    October 7, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • Cloud Misconfig Bounty Hunting in 2026: Open Buckets, Firebase, and Secrets
    Cloud Misconfig Bounty Hunting in 2026: Open Buckets, Firebase, and Secrets
    September 8, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • DevSecOps From Laptop to Production: A Practical Security Pipeline Guide
    DevSecOps From Laptop to Production: A Practical Security Pipeline Guide
    August 27, 2026/
    0 Comments

Follow Us

SecurityCipher

Practical security guides, vulnerability deep-dives, and hands-on resources for bug bounty hunters and penetration testers.

Useful Links

  • Security Checklists
  • Cybersecurity Jobs
  • Blogs
  • About
  • Contact
ยฉ 2026 Security Cipher. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy ยท Terms & Conditions