LAN Manager

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What Does LAN Manager Mean?

LAN Manager is a network operating system originally co-developed by IBM and Microsoft. It supported the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol and, at the time of its deployment, it allowed for a very robust mode of communication within an local area network (LAN). It has since been replaced by other modes of communication within an LAN.

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Techopedia Explains LAN Manager

At the time of its release in the late 1980s, LAN Manager was actually quite visionary. Microsoft’s release of LAN Manager in 1990 showed even more vision with its support for TCP/IP. LAN Manager became rather infamous as the years progressed as its mode of authentication became rather vulnerable to brute force and rainbow table attacks. Microsoft then replaced the LAN Manager hash with NTLM, but some vulnerabilities still remained. Microsoft has since gone on to support the Kerberos authentication protocol, but it still supports of LANMAN and NTLM for legacy systems.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.