gHacks technology news » nt-passwords http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:56:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 No Password securer than weak password ? http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/06/no-password-securer-than-weak-password/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/06/no-password-securer-than-weak-password/#comments Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:15:24 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/06/no-password-securer-than-weak-password/ According to Digital Inspiration that’s the case if you are using Windows XP because leaving the password blank makes it impossible to connect to the computer remotely. The link given in the article which points to the Password Strength & Password Security page at Microsoft.com is unfortunately not available at this point.

It is however still accessible through Google Cache and the article indeed contains a paragraph entitled The “blank password” option. The blank password is only more secure than a weak password like 1234 which can be easily guessed by a brute force attack. The article recommends this only if the location is physically secure.

While this might be a sound advice for some it is in my opinion way better to choose a secure password instead of none. It could be an option for the forgetful.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/06/no-password-securer-than-weak-password/feed/ 2 How to display all Windows passwords http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/23/how-to-display-all-windows-passwords/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/23/how-to-display-all-windows-passwords/#comments Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:42:31 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/23/how-to-display-all-windows-passwords/ 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 windows nt password recoveryOphcrack 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 bruteforce 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.

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. (Ophcrack 1.1.4)

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