Members Of Legendary '90s Hacker Group Relaunch Password-Cracking Tool

L0phtCrack is back: Former members of L0pht Heavy Industries retool their tool after buying it back from Symantec.

It's official: The famous password-cracking tool L0phtCrack is back, and its creators plan to keep it that way.

L0phtCrack 6 tool, released Wednesday, was developed in 1997 by Christien Rioux, Chris Wysopal, and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko from the former L0pht Heavy Industries -- the hacker think tank best known for testifying before Congress that it could shut down the Internet in 30 minutes. In January of this year, Rioux, Wysopal, and Zatko bought back L0phtCrack from Symantec, and later announced they would build a new version of the tool with support for 64-bit Windows platforms and other new features.

"When Symantec stopped supporting L0phtCrack [in 2005], a lot of people were still using it. They left their customers high and dry," says Mudge, who, along with his co-developers, had initially worried that could happen. "We had clauses in place so that if Symantec ever did cease to support and maintain it, we could have certain options [to get it back]. We didn't want somebody to take it from us and deep-six it. We thought it was a useful tool."

Weak passwords are still a major problem today, even 12 years after Mudge and his colleagues first wrote the proof-of-concept code for L0phtCrack. The tool was later sold commercially by @stake, the security consulting firm that purchased L0pht and then was later acquired by Symantec.

"People are still tremendously dependent on passwords. We have all of these cached credentials and network logons," Mudge says, adding that weak passwords are still getting compromised. "This still needs to be brought to people's attention in a relatively powerful way, and that's what the tool always did."

Among the new features in L0phtCrack 6 is 64-bit support, as well as support for Windows Vista. The tool provides password assessment and recovery, dictionary and brute-force cracking, password-quality scoring, remediation, remote scanning, and executive reporting.

Mudge says he's working on a Mac OS X interface for L0phtCrack, and that later versions of the tool will look at different types of password hashes and encoded credentials. The developers also are exploring how to harness more horsepower for the tool using, for instance, a machine's graphics processing card to handle some of the heavy lifting.

L0phtCrack 6 is available for download from L0pht's newly launched Website. It costs $295 for the Professional version, $595 for the Administrator version, and $1,195 for the Consultant version.

McAfee Reveals Most Dangerous Search Terms

In a study of search terms and results leading to malware sites, McAfee found almost six out of ten (59%*) search results for keyword variations of "screensavers" lead to sites containing malware. Half of "lyrics" searches produce the same.

McAfee's report, entitled "The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms," suggests cybercriminals' most desirous targets are youngsters presumed to be less educated about dangers on the Web, less careful about their navigation, and more likely to be searching for freebies.

Sadly, cybercrooks also seem to be targeting those down on their luck; variations of "work from home" searches can be four times riskier than the average risk for all popular terms, says McAfee. Results containing the word "free" carry a 21.3 percent chance of encountering spyware, phishing, adware, viruses or other malware.

But it may not be a matter of target markets. Instead, cybercriminals are probably just casting as wide a net as possible. McAfee made tools of trending sites like Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo Buzz to develop a list of search terms to test. In all 2,600 keywords were tested, but McAfee declined to say which search engines were used for the test.

The recession is surely fueling searches for means of earning extra income and saving money, just as lyrics searches were probably heightened by American Idol performances. Viagra, a popular spam keyword, did not turn out to be as risky as other terms, probably not because the Viagra-using population is less Web savvy, but more likely because there is a smaller demographic searching for information about it.

Other risky terms include "free games," "Rihanna," Webkinz," "Powerball," "iPhone," and "Jonas Brothers."

*That's the calculated maximum risk average. Average category risk is 34.4%