Gone are the days when we have to wait for the days together to recover the Windows account password. Thanks to the rainbow crack technology, now you can crack the passwords in few seconds with 100% success rate.

This Rainbow cracking technology works on simple concept. Instead of computing the LM hashes dynamically during cracking, hashes are computed in advanced for all character sets. These hashes are then stored in rainbow tables. So cracking involves just comparing the pre computed hashes with the LM hash for the account to be cracked. Hence it takes very less time compared to traditional method of brute force cracking. Setting up the rainbow table for various character sets is just one time activity and may take days or months based on the character set and speed of the machine. Once the rainbow tables are ready, you can feed your LM hashes to it and get your password cracked in seconds.

In order to recover your Windows user password, you have to get the LM hash for the target account. This can be done in many ways. If you have another administrator user account on the same machine then you can login with it and dump the LM hash for other account using pwdump tool. Other way is to boot using BackTrack live cd or Windows restore CD and then copy the SAM & SYSTEM hive files (which is located in c:\windows\system32\config folder. Note that your system drive may be different). Next feed these files to Cain & Abel tool to get the LM hashes for the target account.

Now you have LM hash and have setup the rainbow tables, you can start cracking operation using the 'rcrack' tool that comes with RainbowCrack utility pack. If you don’t have enough disk space or can’t wait for months together to setup rainbow tables then you need not have to worry. There are lot of websites which offer free as well as commercial online rainbow cracking. Using free service, you have to wait at most for a day as there will be lot of requests in the queue. However you can get the job done quickly by paying small amount. If you are large organization which involves periodic password recovery process, then you can think of buying those rainbow tables.

Here are the few websites which offer free/commercial online rainbow cracking.
https://www.astalavista.net
http://plain-text.info

Hope this article has enlightened you on new quick method of recovering Windows password.