Reasons For Continued Use
Many legacy third party CIFS implementations have taken considerable time to add support for the stronger protocols that Microsoft has created to replace LM hashing because the open source communities supporting these libraries first had to reverse engineer the newer protocols—Samba took 5 years to add NTLMv2 support, while JCIFS took 10 years.
| Product | NTLMv1 support | NTLMv2 support |
|---|---|---|
| Windows NT 3.1 | RTM (1993) | Not supported |
| Windows NT 3.5 | RTM (1994) | Not supported |
| Windows NT 3.51 | RTM (1995) | Not supported |
| Windows NT 4 | RTM (1996) | Service Pack 4 (25 October 1998) |
| Windows 95 | Not supported | Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000) |
| Windows 98 | RTM | Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000) |
| Windows 2000 | RTM (17 February 2000) | RTM (17 February 2000) |
| Windows ME | RTM (14 September 2000) | Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000) |
| Samba | ? | Version 3.0 (24 September 2003) |
| JCIFS | Not supported | Version 1.3.0 (25 October 2008) |
| IBM AIX (SMBFS) | 5.3 (2004) | Not supported as of v7.1 |
Poor patching regimes subsequent to software releases supporting the feature becoming available have contributed to some organisations continuing to use LM Hashing in their environments, even though the protocol is easily disabled in Active Directory itself.
Lastly, prior to the release of Windows Vista, many unattended build processes still used a DOS boot disk (instead of Windows PE) to start the installation of Windows using WINNT.EXE, something that requires LM hashing to be enabled for the legacy LAN Manager networking stack to work.
Read more about this topic: LM Hash
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