I’m publishing a sample Active Directory database file (ntds.dit) together with the corresponding SYSTEM registry hive so that you can practise hash extraction and password cracking.
This ntds.dit and system file come from a virtual machine I installed just for this purpose: Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with SP1 (English). The reason I selected an old Windows version, is that 2003 still supports LM hashes by default.
I changed the password policy to allow very weak passwords:
I added 40 users: 20 users with passwords taken from the rockyou database leak and 20 users with random passwords (varying in length from 1 to 20 characters). Some of the passwords I randomly selected from rockyou are longer than 14 characters: when a password is longer than 14 characters, Windows does not store a LM hash for that password.
You can find many how-tos on the Internet showing you how to extract the LM and NTLM hashes from the Active Directory database file. I too will posts examples of hash extraction and password cracking.
Happy cracking!
ntds.zip (https)
MD5: F20E477D9784E009777F286ABF718FA3
SHA256: F5EBBF57B3C646FC339ECEEE03063BEDE9E0E7FC8254B0E57A77CC4036134B04
Didier Stevens 
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Pingback by Practice ntds.dit File Part 2: Extracting Hashes | Didier Stevens — Wednesday 13 July 2016 @ 0:00
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Pingback by Week 28 – 2016 – This Week In 4n6 — Sunday 17 July 2016 @ 12:51
Hi Didier,
Thanks!, did you also include password changes/history in the dataset?
Comment by Erik — Sunday 24 July 2016 @ 15:13
No.
Comment by Didier Stevens — Sunday 24 July 2016 @ 15:14
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