Software: Ophcrack

Description: Ophcrack is a free Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. If you have no idea what a rainbow table is, see this article, or follow my password cracking course here for an upcoming article that simplifies the topic. It comes with a Graphical User Interface and runs on multiple platforms.

Screenshot:

Features:

• Cracks LM and NTLM hashes
• Free tables available for Windows XP and Vista
• Brute-force module for simple passwords.
• Audit mode and CSV export
• Real-time graphs to analyze the passwords.
• LiveCD available to simplify the cracking.
• Loads hashes from encrypted SAM recovered from a Windows partition, Vista included

How to use it:

• If you have access to the Windows installation already, but don’t know the password. You can run this program within Windows and it will load the local SAM file that holds the login details and attempt to crack it using the rainbow tables you downloaded.
• If you have access to the computer, but can’t log into the computer, you can download and use the Ophcrack LiveCD. This simply runs Ophcrack from the CD by booting into the CD instead of into Windows. It will attempt to load and crack the Windows passwords.
• If you can’t run the LiveCD on the machine, but have access to the hard drive, you can attach the hard drive to a separate computer and load the encrypted SAM from it and crack it on your computer. Or, if you have an encrypted SAM from anywhere, ophcrack can load it and attempt to crack it.

Video Demonstration:

Download: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/download.php

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