What is the best brute force password cracker for XP/Vista?

Question

I am looking for a brute force password tool along the same lines of the old L0phtcrack tool of yesteryear. Is there any such animal that has been updated for the new windows operating systems?

I would like to be able to run a quick check on the user passwords just to make sure none of them are easily busted with a dictionary attack.

Answer 1

You might want to checkout insecure.org's top 10 password crackers list

Personally, I prefer John the ripper ... but YMMV : - )

Answer 2

ophcrack has worked very well for me in the past. I haven’t used it in a while, though, so I don’t know how well it works in Vista or 7, but it comes in a handy Live CD that requires no installation, so it’s worth a shot.

Answer 3

Look for something that uses rainbow tables like rainbowcrack

tools like this try to pre-compute the solution space and convert the brute force attack into a dictionary attack.

Answer 4

L0phtCrack is back.

Answer 5

Cain & Abel

Insecure.org's list posted by chakrit is top notch.

Answer 6

simply OPHCRACK!