Indeed, the LM hash was easily cracked by l0pht back in the day since the lanman hash could be split in two and cracked separately, meaning it only needed to co

Indeed, the LM hash was easily cracked by l0pht back in the day since the lanman hash could be split in two and cracked separately, meaning it only needed to consider all 7 character combinations. Also, note that with the rainbow tables (for both NTLM and LM hashes), it will give you a password that hashes to the same exact value, but not necessarily the same exact password. This is kind of obvious once you understand that the NTLM (as compared to LM) hash is just md4(password) and is just 16 bytes long. So that's valuable as it will let you log in to the machine, but since it's not actually giving you the actual password back, it's not helpful for logging in to other non-windows systems that may have the same password. Also, it requires administrator level access, a local privilege escalation exploit or a physical copy of the disk, to the SAM database, any of which likely mean that cracking the password is irrelevant.