Just a few days ago I was describing a method that would allow anyone to change passwords for all windows accounts using a boot CD and a program called NT Passwords. This is great if it does not matter if you change the password for, lets say, the administrators account. It might however be sometimes important to get into an account without the owner of the account knowing – and he would surely find out if his password would not be working anymore.
Ophcrack is a tool that is able to quickly display Windows NT account passwords using Rainbow Tables instead of brute forcing the passwords. While it could take years to brute force a password that uses letters, numbers and special chars it takes only minutes to do so with Ophcrack.
Ophcrack can be downloaded with several different table sets. The default live cd is able to reveal passwords with alphanumeric chars only. If no passwords are revealed using this method you should download different table sets which support other chars as well.
Runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, …
» 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.
» Free and open source software (GPL).
Two additional table sets can be downloaded from the Ophcrack website. The first is 720 megabytes and should only be used on machines with at least 500 megabytes of ram. A smaller one with only 388 megabytes can be downloaded for machines with less than that amount of ram.
A new version of Ophcrack was released just four days ago.
Update: Ophcrack has not been updated for some time. The last update dates back to 2009 which was a bug fix release.
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=) … LOL