Ophcrack Password-cracking tool was optimised to work with SSDs have achieved speeds up to 100 times faster when compared to their old 8GB Rainbow Tables for XP hashes. After optimizing its rainbow tables of password hashes to make use of SSDs Swiss security firm Objectif Sécurité was able to crack 14-digit WinXP passwords with special characters in just 5.3 seconds. A free test can be found here.

A new multi-platform password cracking tool hashcat was just released publicly.
Tested on XP, Win7, Gentoo, Debian

The main features of hashcat are:

* It is free.
* Native binaries for Linux and Windows.
* Multi-threaded.
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Three years after Symantec pulled the plug on L0phtcrack, the tool for auditing and cracking windows passwords is back. It was pulled from the market in late 2005 shortly after Symantec acquired @stake, @stake took control of the rights a year or so earlier when it merged with L0pht. With a price starting at $295, will it live up to it’s name when the market has many freeware options to choose from?

L0phtcrack team member Christien Rioux says the features such as scheduling and a dashboard that simplifies the process of disabling users with weak passwords makes the program stand out. “There are a number of enterprise administrative features that make the product worth it for organizations that are doing this on a regular basis,” he said. “It’s been a very long time that this has been out there. The benefit is that we’ve had the opportunity to interact and fix [customer] issues and take [in] their concerns.”

The $295 Professional versions includes:

• Password assessment
• Password recovery
• Dictionary support
• Hybrid support
• Brute force support
• International character support
• Wizard-based GUI
• Password quality scoring
• Remediation
• Windows & Unix support
• Executive reporting
• Remote system scans
• 500 User Accounts (Professional Version)

Chalk up another $300 for the admin version and it gives you support for

• Unlimited accounts
• Pre-computed hash (rainbow) table support
• Assessment scheduling

http://www.l0phtcrack.com

One effective way of assessing password strength is to try and crack them, and as most of you probably know, dictionary attack is the simplest yet formidable technique for cracking passwords. Sébastien Raveau generated a quick & dirty wordlist from Wikipedia in a dozen of languages. It helped quickly crack countless passwords, a lot of which bruteforcing would never get to. The wordlist download can be found at his blog