Quickest way to find saved wifi passwords in a mac machine (within 30 seconds)
I recently borrowed a friend’s MacBook Air laptop, and he challenged me to find a certain wifi password that was already connected to the laptop in past without threatening him 😂 or scanning the QR code for that wifi, etc... I’ve found the quickest and simplest way to accomplish this after doing some study on this. Here is the solution :
- Press the following keys to launch Spotlight Search. Type “terminal” into the search box and hit Enter.
command + spacebar
- Now the terminal will be displayed, it will look like this.
- Now type the following command and hit Enter.
security find-generic-password -wa "wifi_name"
- Replace wifi_name with the name of the wifi network for which you’re looking for the password. (type the wifi name within double quotes)
- The following prompt will appear if the laptop has access to that wifi’s data.
- In order to complete the command successfully, I needed the admin username and password at this point (If you are familiar with them, enter them right away).
- TADA !! Now you will have the wifi password in your terminal window.
This is how I won the challenge.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CnopevFJRCu/?igshid=NDk5N2NlZjQ=
Check out the above post for video tutorial.