Take the 2-minute tour ×  I am trying to recover the password
for one of the logins on a SQL 2005 (SP3) database. There seem
to be a large number of tools out there to do this.  I'm a
little nervous of running a tool against a live database server
that I don't know much about.  What tools would you recommend?
share|improve this question  3 Answers 3  up vote 2 down vote
accepted  NGS Squirrel.  This load the passwords hashes out of
sysxlogins (or whatever the new view is :-) and cracks them: it
does not load the live server  (not to be confused with SQuireL,
the client tools)  share|improve this answer I have used this
and it works great. –  Steve Jones Jun 4 '09 at 15:22  Damn,
beaten to it, I was about to suggest NGS :-)  This URL,
http://www.ngssoftware.com/papers/cracking-sql-passwords.pdf,
describes how their cracker works. They even helpfully supply
C++ source that you can compile yourself. I've used the NGS
software and it works provided the password isn't too hard.  The
NGS software just takes the pa