L0phtCrack 6 Release At SOURCE Boston

A few years ago LC5 (formerly L0phtcrack) was unceremoniously killed off by Symantec. They had acquired the rights to the software when they purchased the security consulting firm @stake. This consulting outfit was the professional day job incarnation of L0pht Heavy Industries.

From Wikipedia:

L0pht was founded in 1992 in the Boston area as a location for its members to store their computer hardware and work on various projects. In time, the members of L0pht quit their day jobs to start a business venture named L0pht Heavy Industries, a hacker think tank.

In a manner of speaking they were a forerunner for the hackerspaces model.

In late 2005 I tried to purchase a commercial copy of LC5 from Symantec only to be stonewalled by rude admins and voice mail jail. I was a little confused. I just wanted to purchase a commercial product that they were selling. Um, where was the problem? Well, just before Christmas ’05 I received a terse phone call from a lawyer informing me that the company that I worked for could not purchase a copy as it was an issue of national security. I stopped laughing in late January when I heard from a source inside Symantec that they were nixing the LC5 product altogether. That end came on Feb 28, 2006.

I sat on my hands as there was little else I could do at the time. I knew from a few folks that if Symantec did not use the product for a specified amount of time that the rights would revert back to the authors. Well, that time has arrived.

This was posted yesterday,

L0phtCrack is back! At a special information session at SOURCE Boston (Thursday, 10:15am), the team that brought you L0phtCrack will be releasing version 6 of the highly-acclaimed Windows password auditing tool. Come to the session to learn about this release, its new features and platform support, and the story of the product from the days of the L0pht, to @stake, Symantec, and finally back to the L0pht.

Looking forward to that session at SOURCE Boston.