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Offline Password Cracking: The Attack and the Best Defense
Offline Password Cracking is an attempt to recover one or more passwords from a password storage file that has been recovered from a target system. Typically, this would be the Security Account Manager (SAM) file on Windows, or the /etc/shadow file on Linux. In most cases, Offline Password Cracking will require that an attacker has already attained administrator / root level privileges on the system to get to the storage mechanism.