How to Use Ophcrack (BSWR)

Who Needs to Use Ophcrack?

The primary use of Ophcrack is for password discovery. Due to the frequent need for password discovery, this is a tool that every IT professionals should keep in their toolbelt. However, not only professionals can use this password cracking tool. Anyone who uses one of the operating systems Ophcrack integrates with may have a situation where they need to recover a password, and this tool is easy to use even without a technical background.

Why Use the Ophcrack Tool?

Ophcrack is an open-source password cracker that’s easy to use and quick. But those are not the only reasons that it is a tool worth learning. Here are some of the added benefits and features you’ll be able to utilize when learning Ophcrack:

It runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X

It cracks hashes (LM and NTLM)

It offers free tables for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7

It recovers passwords automatically via the LiveCD method

It doesn’t require any download to recover passwords

It provides real-time graphs for password analysis

You don’t have to have any knowledge of existing passwords

The password is recovered, not simply reset, which may be helpful for accessing certain archived files

It dumps and loads hashes from encrypted Security Account Manager (SAM) files recovered from a Windows partition

It uses a simple GUI

It’s free

If you would like to learn how to use Ophcrack for password recovery, continue with our Ophcrack tutorial. This course will show you everything you need to know to crack passwords quickly and easily.

Teaching Assistant Vikramajeet Khatri and Tahir Ibrahim

(Disclaimer: Breaking Stuff with Robert is a Cybrary series that will be running indefinitely. You will not earn CEU/CPE hours by watching any individual 'Breaking Stuff with Robert' episode. However, you can still earn a certificate of completion for each episode completed.)