Now your Microsoft Windows password can be cracked in 13.6 seconds, a vast improvement over the slow and tedious 101 seconds it took previously. An improved cryptanalytic method uses large amounts of memory–in this case, 1.4 GB–to speed its cracking of
keys, says Security Wire Digest.
I won’t bore you with how they did it. But the bottom line is that this attack doesn’t pose any practical threat, since only an administrator would be able to encryped password to conduct the attack, and users can resist by using passwords that contain more than just letters and numbers.