Cracking Windows passwords

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If your passwords consist of letters and numbers, beware.

Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from 1 minute 41 seconds.

The method involves using large lookup tables to match encoded passwords to the original text entered by a person, thus speeding the calculations required to break the codes. Called a time-memory trade-off, the situation means that an attacker with an abundance of computer memory can reduce the time it takes to break a secret code.

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Original article here. Everyone should take heed of this one.....

Thanks for the heads up allenb1963.

I guess we need to do some securing around here. *gets up and looks around for the admin*

Thanks again...

Well its probably time for a good password change for most of us anyways. thanks for the info.

PeacE
-BoB

When will people ever start to use good passwords. Come on everyone, a good password consists of at least 12 of the following with at least 3 from every field: letters of varying case, numbers, symbols, and special symbols/characters.

Some people will never learn. they will be the ones that get compromised. Atleast we can help the ones willing to learn.

PeacE
-BoB

They will when their box or account has been hacked. I always tell people when they make a password think of a sentence and then replace some of the letters with numbers and ascii characters

i think that when their box does get hacked they'll just try to figure out which of the people they gave their password to told somebody.

oh boy!! its was great.....

Learnt two lessons from this post:
1. use non alphanumeric characters in my passwords..
2. Never Ever RELY on MICROSOFT.. :D

Thanx allenb1963, for good piece of information..

Escape Windowz world that is true. Amen!

can you use non alphanumeric characters in a password??

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Originally posted here by strykerfenix
can you use non alphanumeric characters in a password??

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Usually you can, it all depends on the app that requires the password....ie, some web apps will not allow the use of special characters, some will.

I think you can't use characters that you can't find on a standard keyboard. If windows doesn't support them for file names (it makes them unopenable) chances are it won't be supported for passwords. Although having said that, I tried using [ALT] + 458 , and it allowed it. Whether it was stored as the symbol, or as an underscore (this is what it usually displays in Explorer when you rename a file in dos) I don't know.

Windows XP and NTFS support the usage of special characters and ANSI characters, previous versions of windows and FAT32, windows 98 and under do not.

thnks for the info i guess its time to get a new password

hackophreak56

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Originally posted here by The3ntropy
When will people ever start to use good passwords. Come on everyone, a good password consists of at least 12 of the following with at least 3 from every field: letters of varying case, numbers, symbols, and special symbols/characters.

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I feel wierd now i normally use passwords like xGV9*m8tSkY!

Its kinda sad when you gotta make up a song to remember your log on password :p

By non alphanumeric characters(not alphabets & numbers), i mean adding special characters such as @,#,$ etc.. in the passwords..The inclusion of symbols other than alphanumeric characters adds complexity to the process of breaking passwords...

yes non alphanumeric chars can be used.But on some logins it is disabled,depends from plae to place.
Good article though it scared me enough to change my password

Thanks allenb1963 fort the heads up.

I change up my passwords evey other month so i'm set up pretty nicley on my server
But thanks. MICROSOFT horrible coders.only thing that microsoft has done other than revolutionize the world as we know it with technolgy based clients is NOTHING


[gloworange]
PsychoJester[/gloworange]

Do they make fingerprint/eye recognition thingys that work with XP passwords? Maybe give you a different kind of login screen? If I could get my hands on something like that.....I'd feel like Batman.

Since this post, I have decided to change my passwords to something like this... Thanks :)
?\,²!_§^;³