Following is list of some well known and powerful password cracking tools that usually each and every hacker has in his/her toolkit. Since they are best sooner or later we will cover all of them on this blog.
Whenever they will be covered you'll find click here link to read more about that tool. For now lets take our first time eye on those tools.

L0phtCrack

L0phtCrack was developed by L0pht Heavy Industries to reveal the security flaws in Windows authentication system. Now it lists out itself as one of the best Windows based password hacking tools. Its popularity is so high that nearly every password dumping tool dumps password in L0phtCrack compatible format or has option to dump password for L0phtCrack. It attempts to crack Windows password from hashes which can be obtained from standalone computers, networked devices or active directories. It supports various methods to attack for getting valid password including dictionary based attack, rainbow tables, hybrid attacks and even brute force. If used with proper hardware there's no way any password can withstand its might. The best part it is that it now supports cracking Linux and UNIX password too. You can download and use it for 15 days as trial.

John The Ripper

Currently known as best password cracker available. It is command line tool. Officially it supports several Operating Systems including several versions of Linux and UNIX and practically all versions of Windows. If your OS is not supported you can download source files and compile it to get a working tool. The best part of compiled source is that it is optimized to work better on your system. Its primary purpose is to detect weak UNIX, Linux and Windows based password. Both free and pro versions are available and they both are equally good. Please note that many anti-virus programs usually consider password cracking tools as virus or Trojans and John The Ripper doesn't fall in exception. I would better advice you to use this tool on a system without Anti-Virus program.

Brutus

Brutus is network brute force attacking tool. It is windows only tool but can also be used with many versions of Linux with help of Wine and Crossover. It works against network service of remote systems and tries to get password using dictionary based, hybrid and brute force attack. Officially it supports several protocols including HTTP, POP3, FTP, SMB, TELNET, IAMP, NTP and many more. Even if any protocol is not supported protocol support plug-ins are available. Its free but source code is not available.

THC Hydra

Whenever you need a brute force attacker for remote system THC Hydra is always a tool of choice. It can perform rapid dictionary attacks against more then 30 protocols, including telnet, ftp, http, https, smb, several databases, and much more. Officially Windows system is not supported but you can run it in Cygwin a UNIX emulator for windows.

Rainbow Crack

The RainbowCrack tool is a hash cracker that makes use of a large-scale time-memory trade-off. A traditional brute force cracker tries all possible plaintexts one by one, which can be time consuming for complex passwords. RainbowCrack uses a time-memory trade-off to do all the cracking-time computation in advance and store the results in so-called "rainbow tables". It does take a long time to precompute the tables but RainbowCrack can be hundreds of times faster than a brute force cracker once the precomputation is finished.

Solar Winds Engineers Toolset

Not only one of the best enumeration and networking monitoring tool Solar Winds also stands out to be tool that can be used as awesome password auditing tool. It has more than 20 system monitoring tools along with identification of weak user accounts and password. A must have tool for every Windows administrator.