Many of us have a love-hate relationship with passwords. They're
great for dissuading youngsters from logging onto our machines and
wreaking havoc with our files, but they're just as likely to turn around
and bite us. Forget an obscure, intricately crafted password and you're
in a world of pain.
It's true that all versions of Windows
enable you to create password recovery discs, but what do you do if you
find yourself locked out without that disc? There are several tools out
there that can help you recover the forgotten password, and the best of
the lot is Ophcrack.
Its key utility reads the Security Accounts
Manager (SAM) files in Windows - the files that keep user account
passwords in LAN Manager (LM) or NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hash format. It
uses pre-computed rainbow tables to recover the passwords. Security
researcher Dr Philippe Oechslin developed the tables and the tool.
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