from being generated for their own password by using a password at least fifteen characters in length. -- NTLM hashes have in turn become vulnerable in recent years to various attacks that effectively make them as weak today as LanMan hashes were back in 1998. Reasons for continued use of LM hash Many legacy third party SMB implementations have taken considerable time to add support for the stronger protocols that Microsoft has created to replace LM hashing because the open source communities supporting these libraries first had to reverse engineer the newer protocols—Samba took 5 years to add NTLMv2 support, while JCIFS took 10 years. Poor patching regimes subsequent to software releases supporting the feature becoming available have contributed to some organisations continuing to use LM Hashing in their environments, even though the protocol is easily disabled in Active Directory itself. Lastly, prior to the release of Windows Vista, many unattended build processes still used a DOS boot disk (instead of Windows PE) to start the installation of Windows using WINNT.EXE, something that requires LM hashing to be enabled for the legacy LAN Manager networking stack to work. See also NT LAN Manager Active Directory Password cracking Dictionary attack Remote Program Load (RPL) Security Account Manager Notes References External links https://web.archive.org/web/20170212195243/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc237025.aspx Computer access control protocols Discontinued Microsoft operating systems Network operating systems OS/2 Password authentication Broken hash functions Microsoft Windows security technology 1987 software