Password Cracking vs. Password Policy Auditing
by Ron Gula on August 31, 2006
Recently, a Tenable customer asked me if we had any plans or capability to perform brute force password cracking with Nessus. For those familiar with Nessus, this wasn't about testing for default user accounts during a network scan. The customer was asking to obtain the encrypted password databases from Windows and UNIX and try to brute-force their contents offline to find weak passwords. This particular customer was running several different password cracking tools across several different operating systems.