In modern cryptography, a "salt" is a random string added to a password before hashing to ensure that two users with the same password have different hashes. Because NTLM lacks salting, the hash for "Password123" is identical on every Windows machine in the world. This makes NTLM highly susceptible to attacks and rainbow table lookups. Online vs. Offline Decrypters
These are web-based services where you paste a hash, and the site checks its massive internal database of previously cracked hashes. They are fast but pose a privacy risk, as you are giving a third party a potentially valid credential.
If you are an IT administrator, the existence of NTLM hash decrypters should be a signal to upgrade your security posture:
The primary reason NTLM hashes are frequent targets is that they are .
