Topic: password cracking
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Rainbow Tables in 2026: Are They Still Useful?
Rainbow tables are precomputed tools that can reverse unsalted cryptographic hashes to plaintext passwords, but they are largely ineffective against modern, salted hashes. In early 2026, Mandiant publicly released massive rainbow tables to demonstrate the complete obsolescence of the NTLMv1 proto...
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Generative AI Supercharges Active Directory Attacks
Generative AI is making sophisticated password attacks cheaper, faster, and more accessible, fundamentally shifting the cybersecurity landscape by enabling highly targeted and efficient assaults on identity systems like Active Directory. AI-powered attacks leverage pattern recognition and adversa...
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$30,000 GPU Password Cracking Test: Results
A benchmark test found that high-end consumer GPUs, like the Nvidia RTX 5090, significantly outperform expensive AI accelerators (Nvidia H200, AMD MI300X) in password-cracking speed, making specialized AI hardware a poor investment for this purpose. The primary organizational risk is not advanced...
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New FortiBleed campaign uses custom sniffer to steal FortiGate credentials
The FortiBleed campaign has targeted over 430,000 Fortinet FortiGate firewalls since February 2026, using custom Golang-based sniffers to intercept authentication traffic and steal credentials. Attackers exploit FortiOS's legitimate "diagnose sniffer packet" feature via SSH to capture data from 2...
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Crack Weak Admin Passwords in 12 Hours with Mandiant's New Tool
Mandiant has released a free, public database that can crack passwords protected by the outdated NTLMv1 hash algorithm in under 12 hours using consumer hardware, dramatically lowering the barrier for attackers. The tool is a precomputed rainbow table hosted on Google Cloud, enabling the quick rev...
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