LM Hash Cracking – Rainbow Tables vs GPU Brute Force

NetSPI reviews its 2014 cracking stats: of 90,977 collected Windows domain hashes, 85.52% cracked, with seasonal patterns like Spring2014, Password1, and company-name variants dominating the hits.

NetSPI's Q3 2014 cracking report: of 26,692 collected domain hashes, 82.25% cracked, with eight-character passwords peaking, 348 blank passwords found, and the top mask pattern seen 1,415 times.

NetSPI's Q2 2014 cracking report: of 23,898 collected domain hashes, 89.82% cracked, eight-character passwords dominated, and 'Changem3' topped the list at 820 instances.

NetSPI's Q1 2014 cracking report: of 10,050 collected domain hashes, 74.73% were cracked, 'Password1' topped the list at 606 instances, and eight-character passwords dominated.

The final GPU cracking series post gathers common hash sources, such as LM/NTLM from SAM and SYSTEM files, plus cracking methods and strategies — a beginner's guide to a working cracking setup.

NetSPI built a GPU cracking rig with four Radeon HD 7950 cards running oclHashcat, hitting about 25 billion NTLM guesses per second, and shares hardware, cooling, and cabling lessons.