There are three major changes from the previous version:
- Uses “random” named pipes (GUIDs) to allow concurrent copies of the client to run. This is predominately for the next version of fgdump, which will be multithreaded.
- Will turn off password histories if the requisite APIs are not available (there are instances in which this is the case) – pwdump will no longer simply refuse to grab the hashes that it can.
- Data is now encrypted over the named pipe using the Blowfish algorithm. More information on this is available on the website.
pwdump is a very useful tool for grabbing the password hashes directly from Windows (you do need Administrator access, so in some situations you need to escalate your priveleges first).
It is still useful though, as normally with Admin access on a Windows box you can’t get the SAM file as it’s locked by the OS, the only way normally is to boot using a Security LiveCD and save it to a USB drive or e-mail it to yourself.
You can grab the latest version of pwdump here.
