
Our recent feature on the growing vulnerability of passwords chronicled the myriad ways crackers extract clues used to guess other people’s login credentials. Add to that list a password reminder feature built in to recent versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It turns out the password clues for Windows 7 and 8 are stored in the OS registry in a scrambled format that can be easily converted into human-readable form. That information would undoubtedly be useful to hackers who intercept a cryptographic hash of a targeted computer, but are unable to crack it. Read the full story at ARS Technica.