About time someone tried this: Using the "brute force" technique
of recovering passwords, it was possible, though time-consuming,
to recover passwords from popular applications. For example, the
logon password for Windows Vista might be an eight-character
string composed of uppercase and lowercase alphabetic
characters. There would about 55 trillion (52 to the eighth
power) possible passwords. Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing by
default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to
10,000,000 passwords per second, and perform a complete analysis
in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new technology, the
process would take only three to five days, depending upon the
CPU and GPU.