Rainbow table support has been improved. We now use the much faster and smaller rainbow tables generated by freerainbowtables.com.

NTLM support is improved and available for all cracking types. Now that many versions of Windows have discontinues storing the LANMAN hash for security reasons, the more difficult to crack NTLM hash must be audited. That is now the L0phtCrack default behavior.



What configuration (hardware/software) would you recommend for a security professional that's running L0phtcrack 6 for work?

Lots of cores! Many gamers get a single CPU with a very high clock rate instead of a CPU with 2 cores with an average clock rate because most games are not multithreaded. With L0phtcrack you want the opposite. Get as many cores as you can with the dollars you have to spend on CPU. Personally, I use the Intel Core i7 2.66MHz which as four cores for a reasonable price ($284). Speed freaks my want to get the 3.33Mhz version but it is pricy at $999.

A lot of RAM is not necessary. 100M is good for most cracking jobs. You also don't need a lot of hard disk space unless you want to do a lot of rainbow table cracking. Then the sky is the limit. You could easily use 200MB for rainbow tables.


The release of L0phtcrack was met with lots of enthusiasm from the security community. Are you satisfied with the response? How many users do you have with the new release?

We are very excited about the response to the return of L0phtcrack. We have had many old customers and just plain fans send us notes of congratulations. We really appreciate it! We wouldn't be doing the L0phtCrack project if it wasn't fun and appreciated by the security community. We have had 25,000 downloads of the new version.

What are your plans for the future? What kind of evolution can we expect?

We are looking forward to enhancing the metrics and reporting on passwords. We think a lot can be done here. Additionally we want to improve the ability to audit the local machines passwords for large networks and look for account/password reuse. We are always looking out for new types of passwords to crack. Lotus Notes may be next. We have a usergroup set up. If anyone has any feature ideas to request we will certainly consider them.

L0phtCrack is available here.