Five times faster brute force with 4-core CPU? Yes the new L0phtCrack 7 is now 5 times faster than L0phtCrack 6. And if you have a system with AMD Radeon Pro Duo the acceleration is amazing up to 500 times faster.
The L0phtCrack first released 19 years ago. A very powerful password cracker that forced Microsoft to make improvements to the way Windows stores password hashes accesss.
Microsoft finally eliminated weak LANMAN hash codes and started using only the strongest NTLM that it still uses up to date. However, password cracking algorithms and system hardware have improved significantly in the years to come.
The new version of L0phtCrack 7 demonstrates that the passwords of Windows are much easier to crack today than they were 18 years ago when Microsoft began making necessary strength improvements to stored passwords.
In one computer of 1998 with a Pentium II 400 MHz CPU, the original L0phtCrack could crack a code of Windows NT 8 characters (alphanumeric) within 24 hours. On a 2016 machine, L0phtCrack 7 can crack the same password stored on the latest version of Windows 10 within 2 hours.
Windows passwords have become much less secure over time and are much easier to break from the Windows NT era.
Other operating systems, such as Linux, offer much safer password fragmentations, such as SHA-512.