Cracking Windows passwords in seconds. Researchers outline a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds. [CNET News.com]

This is an interesting article which focuses on the speed of cracking passwords that have been dumped to a file by the administrator. Although it appears to look like another password cracking tool, the primary significance of this article is to highlight how easily alphanumeric passwords can be broken on Windows systems. They achieve this speed by using lots of RAM, a large lookup table, and a weakness in password encryption on Windows systems.