"Cached credentials"
Cached credentials for an AD domain are actually salted double hashes of le password et stored in le HKLM\Security hive. The file location of le hive is:
%systemroot%\System32\config\SECURITY
Only le "system" user has access to le registry keys:
HKLM\Security\Cache\NL$n où n is an index 1 to le maximum number of cached credentials.
Susceptibility to Attacks
WinNT to WinXP used "Lan Manager" hashes for local accounts, qui are easily broken on modern hardware. Cracking usually takes plusieurs minutes (I recently did 3 passwords in 00:08:06) avec juste a "normal" desktop computer. Lan Manager hashes are pas salted, so there are publicly disponible rainbow tables too.
Vista et later use NT hashes for local accounts. Windows 2000 et later use NT hashes for domain accounts as well. NT hashes are salted double-MD4 hashes. The per-entry salt prevents le use of rainbow tables, mais MD4 can be executed très fast on modern hardware: about 6 compute-years for a 60-bit password. With luck et a 6 GPU cluster a cracker can break this sort of password in 6 months. Taking that to le cloud, about $35k on Amazon EC2 GPU - depending on availability, it could be hours.