Cracking Windows passwords in seconds

[Julio Franco]

Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds.

The researcher used a 1.4GB lookup table and a single computer with an AMD 2500+ processor and 1.5GB RAM to offer people a way to test the process online.

Read more: CNet News.

 

[Phantasm66]

There's a fairly long queue right now, but I am trying to submit a request to have a password cracked. AFAIK they do not have any software utility you can download, as such, you can just send Lanmanager and NT hashs to them for them to crack.

As they note, DES is getting completely out of date with the kinds of machines we have today floating around. We need a much stronger encryption standard to last us the next 10 years or so.