Hash Suite

Regardless of the activities for which you are using a computer, sooner or later you need to create a password to keep your data safe. Most importantly, one of the most commonly encountered security gates is before your computer reaches the desktop, where user credentials need to be provided. In order to test out strength, applications such as Hash Suite let you import several account type credentials while attempting to crack it from the hash.

Test accounts for multiple machines

An important advantage is the office suite like interface, which quickly gets you up and running thanks to the well-organized upper toolbar and intuitive icons. The rest of the space is a list of imported items, displaying username, hash and clear text.
Right from the start, you are prompted by a wizard that offers several hints of what is to come. Account credentials can fetched from the local machine, a local area network, pwdump or cachedump file. For security reasons, administrator privileges are required so that the correct details can be gathered.

Various password types to check

Depending on the analysis you need done, the application is able to narrow down search results and only provide passwords of the LM, NTLM or DCC format, with additional options letting you choose the key provider, which can be charset, wordlist, keyboard, phrases, DB info, as well as LM2NT.

Multiple test cases to run

What's more, a dedicated section gives you the possibility to specify rules by which a virtual attack to target imported data. You can quickly select both common and less common methods for enhanced results, but it can take some time. Various character combination possibilities can be selected from the available fields, since password type requirements might have mandatory requirements of upper case letters, numbers or special characters.

Force change of weak passwords

Furthermore, depending on the gathered result, additional tools let you force specific users to have their passwords changed, if cracking was no problem for the application, or completely disable an account. What's more, you can test out new passwords with the help of a hash calculator that provides the result in LM and NTLM, with the possibility to export data.

In conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Hash Suite can definitely come in handy, especially in environments that keep highly important data on hard disk drives. Algorithms used to attempt and crack your password might take some time, but in the end, a little patience might keep your personal data or job safe.