L0pht has been a staple of the hacking scene since the Internet existed, with the ever fabulous L0phtcrack being their best known offering.
Of course when that was sold off to Symantec then subsequently discontinued, things changed a lot.
Well now the Hacker News Network is back online, one of the side projects of L0pht Heavy Industries [...]

We have covered quite a lot of Password Cracking tools and it’s not often a new one comes out, this one is for quite a specialised purpose (not a general all-purpose password cracker like John the Ripper or Cain & Abel), although you do need to use it alongside JTR.
This tool is for instantly cracking [...]

This is another selection from the Old Skool Philes, I like these as they tend to generate some good discussion and they are a good introduction to newcomers to hacking on the mindset and workflow of getting access to a box. The exact methods may not work, but we aren’t here to train script kiddies, [...]

This Phenoelit tool called ObiWaN is written to carry out brute force security testing on Webservers.
The idea behind this is webservers with simple challenge-response authentication mechanism mostly have no switches to set up intruder lockout or delay timings for wrong passwords. In fact this is the point to start from. Every user with a [...]

As a security consultant, job functions include Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments. The aim of these types of engagements is to demonstrate risk to the customer. One of the steps involved in demonstrating risk is password auditing (”cracking”) in order to assess the strength and quality of passwords in use in the environment.
On a Windows [...]

Since Symantec stopped development of L0phtcrack many people have been looking for alternatives.
So don’t forget…

Jack the Ripper is still king
Medusa is good
Ophcrack for Rainbow Tables
And now one more, introducting LCP, which we have talked about before in the article Password Cracking with Rainbowcrack and Rainbow Tables.
LCP is freeware!
The main purpose of LCP program is user [...]

Man this blows.
It seems it happened quite a while ago, I only just found out about it recently though when I was checking to see if L0phtcrack had been updated past version 5.

Symantec has quietly pulled the plug on sales of L0phtCrack, the venerable password auditing and recovery application.
The decision to discontinue support for L0phtCrack, [...]

1. Nmap
I think everyone has heard of this one, recently evolved into the 4.x series.
Nmap (”Network Mapper”) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what [...]

What is RainbowCrack & Rainbow Tables?
RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique.
In 1980 Martin Hellman described a cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off which reduces the time of cryptanalysis by using precalculated data stored in memory. This technique was improved by Rivest before 1982 with the introduction of distinguished points which drastically [...]