Password Tool Resurrected

Long after Symantec mercy-killed L0phtcrack in late 2005, the extremely useful password cracker has finally risen from its own ashes and come back better than ever. That's not just a marketing byline either; it's returned with the same old capabilities and a couple of new ones for good measure.

Beginning tomorrow, on Wednesday, L0phtcrack 6 will be available for wide-release from the same unholy alliance of hackers who first gave life to this hacking tool ten years past. The potentially dangerous software was pulled from distribution three years ago after it was bought by Symantec. Obviously, the hacking abilities of the program didn't sit well with the corporation's line of anti-hacking services and security products.

L0pthcrack popular password recovery tool

Even though applications like Cain and Abel and John the Ripper filled the password cracking abyss left by the popular application, it was just not the same.

L0phtcrack was a highly-esteemed password cracker that brought awareness to password strength to mainstream user consciousness.

For an allegedly harmful program, it did a lot of good.

According to HD Moore, the Metasploit project's founder, L0phtcrack was one of the few password crackers that appeared "legitimate at the time".

It was not only used extensively by "assessment folks" and "pen testers", it was also commonly employed by system administrators in order to test the strength and quality of the passwords for their systems.

Moore claims that people can mostly blame L0phtcrack for the abandonment of the LAN Manager (LANMan) password hash that Microsoft used to employ.

That particular algorithm operates on a simple, case-sensitive, and seven-character scheme that makes password cracking especially effortless.

He explains that L0phtrack changed people's interpretation of how to create strong and secure passwords because the password cracker is supposedly the "number one reason" why users and corporations started creating passwords longer than 14 characters and abandoned easy-to-crack LANMan hashes.

Many changes have come to pass since five years ago, when L0phtcrack 5 was made available, and many of those changes are addressed by the features found in L0phtcrack 6.

It brings a shark-like aggressiveness to cracking passwords that utilize the NTLM hash, the algorithm of choice for Windows pass phrase security that has become popular in the last few years. It also provides added support and assistance for x64 processors and the newest platform releases from Ubuntu, Linux, Microsoft, and many others.
 
The pricey $295 application may not be the most inexpensive password cracking tool out there, but Christien Rioux, a developer of L0phtcrack, says that its extra features—like a dashboard that abridges the act of disabling users with weak passwords and a special scheduling option—makes the revived legacy application stand out among its competitors.