It’s been quite a while since we’ve written about Cain & Abel, one of the most powerful tools for the Windows platform (back in 2007 here).
Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, [...]

Cain & Abel is easily one of our favourite password crackers here at Darknet, especially because it’s oldskool but still under development, unlike most other projects which have been abandoned as time passed.
Cain & Abel has some awesome stuff built in like native network sniffing and network password grabbing.

Cain & Abel is a password recovery [...]

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 [...]