Speaking of which, is there any way to remove lanman hashes from user objects 
without changing the password? I think I know the answer, but I hope I'm 
wrong...

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 9:57 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: How easy is it to crack passwords?

Ridiculously easy, unless the password is quite long...

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/

By Nate Anderson
Ars Technica
Mar 24 2013

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never 
cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000.
Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was 
ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my 
laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, 
Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was 
approaching entry-level "script kiddie stuff."
This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking 
conceptually—I can't hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I'm the very 
definition of a "script kiddie," someone who needs the simplified and automated 
tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn't manage if left to his 
own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once 
logged into port 25 of our school's unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank 
message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. 
If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly 
placed to test that assertion.

It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and 
the resources of the Internet, successfully:

Find a set of passwords to crack
Find a password cracker
Find a set of high-quality wordlists and Get them all running on commodity 
laptop hardware in order to Successfully crack at least one password In less 
than a day of work?

[...]

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ 
<http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

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~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

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