http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/27/l0phtcrack_returns/ 

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The Register
27th May 2009

More than three years after Symantec unceremoniously pulled the plug on 
L0phtcrack, the seminal tool for auditing and cracking passwords is back 
with a set of new capabilities.

Starting Wednesday, L0phtcrack 6 is available from the same team of 
hackers who introduced it to the world a decade ago. The program was 
pulled from the market in late 2005 shortly after it was acquired by 
Symantec, presumably because its offensive capabilities didn't fit in 
with the company's portfolio of defensive products and services.

While programs like John the Ripper and Cain and Abel in many ways 
filled the void, L0phtcrack is credited with bringing awareness about 
password strength to the masses.

"It was one of the few tools that you could use to do password cracking 
that looked legitimate at the time," said HD Moore, founder of the 
Metasploit project. "It became fairly common for not only the pen 
testers and the assessment folks to use but also very common for system 
administrators to use to audit the passwords of their systems."

[...]


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