L0phtCrack is a

password A password, sometimes called a passcode (for example in Apple devices), is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of ...

audit An audit is an "independent examination of financial information of any entity, whether profit oriented or not, irrespective of its size or legal form when such an examination is conducted with a view to express an opinion thereon.” Auditing ...

ing and

recovery Recovery or Recover may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books * ''Recovery'' (novel), a Star Wars e-book * Recovery Version, a translation of the Bible with footnotes published by Living Stream Ministry Film and television * ''Recovery'' (fil ...

application originally produced by

Mudge Mudge is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: Politics * Dirk Mudge (1928–2020), Namibian politician * Geoffrey Mudge, English politician Religion * Enoch Mudge (1776–1850), first Methodist minister reared in New England * ...

from L0pht Heavy Industries. It is used to test

password strength Password strength is a measure of the effectiveness of a password against guessing or brute-force attacks. In its usual form, it estimates how many trials an attacker who does not have direct access to the password would need, on average, to gues ...

and sometimes to recover lost

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

passwords, by using

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...

, brute-force, hybrid attacks, and

rainbow tables A rainbow table is an efficient way to store data that has been computed in advance to facilitate cracking passwords. To protect stored passwords from compromise in case of a data breach, organizations avoid storing them directly, instead transfo ...

. The initial version was released in the Spring of 1997. The application was produced by

@stake ATstake, Inc. was a computer security professional services company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1999 by Battery Ventures (Tom Crotty, Sunil Dhaliwal, and Scott Tobin) and Ted Julian. Its initial core team of techno ...

after the L0pht merged with @stake in 2000. @stake was then acquired by Symantec in 2004. Symantec later stopped selling this tool to new customers, citing US Government export regulations, and discontinued support in December 2006. In January 2009, L0phtCrack was acquired by the original authors Zatko, Wysopal, and Rioux from Symantec. L0phtCrack 6 was announced on 11 March 2009 at the SOURCE Boston Conference. L0phtCrack 6 contains support for 64-bit Windows platforms as well as upgraded rainbow tables support. L0phtCrack 7 was released on 30 August 2016, seven years after the previous release. L0phtCrack 7 supports GPU cracking, increasing performance up to 500 times that of previous versions. On April 21, 2020 Terahash announced it had acquired L0phtCrack. Details of the sale were not released. On July 1, 2021 L0pht Holdings, LLC repossessed L0phtCrack after Terahash defaulted on its instalment sale loan. The current owners announced that they were exploring open source options for L0phtcrack. Due to commercial libraries existing within the software this may take some time. On October 17, 2021 L0phtCrack version 7.2.0 was released open-source, with different portions of the software being published under different licenses.

References

External links

L0phtCrack Website

L0phtCrack repositories
on

GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer S ...

Passwords 2015 Keynote 1: Chris Wysopal
L0pht Password cracking software Formerly proprietary software Free security software {{Security-software-stub