Pwned Passwords Adds NTLM Support to the Firehose

I think I’ve pretty much captured it all in the title of this post but as of about a day ago, Pwned Passwords now has full parity between the SHA-1 hashes that have been there since day 1 and NTLM hashes. We always had both as a downloadable corpus but as of just over a year ago with the introduction of the FBI data feed, we stopped maintaining downloadable behemoths of data.

A little later, we added the downloader to make it easy to pull down the latest and greatest complete data set directly from the same API that so many of you have integrated into your own apps. But because we only had an API for SHA-1 hashes, the downloader couldn’t grab the NTLM versions and increasingly, we had 2 corpuses well out of parity.

I don’t know exactly why, but just over the last few weeks we’ve had a marked uptick in requests for an updated NTLM corpus. Obviously there’s still a demand to run this against local Active Directory environments and clearly, the more up to date the hashes are the more effective they are at blocking the use of poor passwords.

So, Chief Pwned Passwords Wrangler Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson got to work and just went ahead and built it all for you. For free. In his spare time. As a community contribution. Seriously, have a look through the public GitHub repos and it’s all his work ranging from the API to the Cloudflare Worker to the downloader so if you happen to come across him say, at NDC Oslo in a few months’ time, show your appreciation and buy the guy a beer ?

Lastly, every time I look at how much this tool is being used, I’m a bit shocked at how big the numbers are getting:

That’s well more than double the number of monthly requests from when I wrote the blog post about the FBI and NCA only just over a year ago, and I imagine that will only continue to increase, especially with today’s announcement about NTLM hashes. Thank you to everyone that has taken this data and done great things with it, we’re grateful that it’s been put to good use and has undoubtedly helped an untold number of people to make better password choices ?