A rainbow table is basically an enormous list of passwords — basically every password abruteforce attackwould try —
with
their respective hashes included. Although this table takes a lotof time to generate, it can reduce the cracking of passwords to minutes, or even seconds.
Downloadable Tables
Ophcrack supplies a few of these rainbow tables, free, for your use. They’re included in theLive CD, can automatically be retrieved from the Windows executable, or downloaded from theOphcrack website. We’ll quickly look over the available tables, and their possibilities.
For Windows XP
, Ophcrack supplies two alphanumeric tables. With these, you can crack99.99% of all passwords under 14 characters, consisting of a combination between letters andnumbers — abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789. Because the LM hash used byWindows XP is insensitive to capitalization, these hash tables contain 80 billion differenthashes, corresponding with 12septillionpossible passwords.You can choose between the
XP free small
and the
XP free fast tables
. These can both be usedto crack the same passwords, but because the XP free fast table is twice as large, you cancrack them in half the time.The downside of both tables is their unability to crack passwords with special characters —these can only be cracked using the premium
XP special
tables.
For Windows Vista
, which abandoned the weak LM hash, and moved on to the stronger NThash, there are less possibilities. Currently, Ophcrack only gives away a table with dictionary-words and variations (hybrids) for free. If you’re willing to cough up a lot of money (about 99$), they also provide alphanumerical tables – including special characters.Because the NT hash
is
subjective to capitalization, and allows a much greater passwordlength (whereas the LM hash simply splits large sequences up in multitudes of smaller strings),these premium rainbow tables can range in size from 8GB to over 130GB.And that’s the essence of it. There’s some more technical information (a real how-to) in theOphcrack help files (included in the downloads).If you’re shivering in your boots after reading this article and thinking,”Gosh, everyone’s goingto know how to hack my password. What shall I do?” Then it may be a good time to create astronger password. Stefan wrote about5 free password generatorsthat will help you makenearly unhackable passwords, no matter what password hack tools a hacker tries to use. It’sa good start.So, what do you think? Is Ophcrack really the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or hardlyworth one’s attention? — Let us know your experiences, opinions and questions in thecomments section below.
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