Imagine this scenario, you buy a new laptop and you fire up Mozilla Firefox to check your email. “Server not found?” How can that be? You then see a friendly little bubble notifying you that there are networks available. Why doesn’t your new notebook automatically connect to your usual network?

Windows Zero Configuration Tool Blues

Suddenly, it dawns on you that all of your WEP keys and WPA PSKs were stored on your old laptop. Fortunately, you haven’t sold the old clunker yet so you turn it on and search for all of you many stored keys and pass phrases. Alas, you realize that you’ve been using the Windows Zero Configuration utility. Sure, it’s featureless and pretty much as basic as software can get. But it is a familiar window you could count on a Windows computer to interface and configure your wireless-networking adapter. Now that convenience bites back! The zero configuration tool cleverly hides your keys and passpharses to make it seemingly not retrievable. Hence “seemingly.”

WZCook

My dad experienced this exact same scenario he purchased a new laptop a couple months ago. Luckily, I had the Win32-compiled aircrack-ng suite on hand, which also came with WZCook. WZCook extracts your Wi-Fi passpharses and passkeys from wherever the zero configuration tool hides them! Feeling the zero configuration blues? Stick with the manufacturer’s configuration utility and download the aircrack-ng suite or the WZCook utility today!