Archive for May, 2009

First, Gigabyte suggests GV-N275UD-896H GeForce GTX 275 with special cooling system added. And second news – Thermaltake Technology threw a stylish Massive23 laptop cooler. +25C in Moscow makes us think of a better cooling here as well 🙂

Hardware acceleration of password recovery has been a hot topic for quite some time already. We were the first to adopt widely available graphic cards for this purpose and we’re proud of this. Today I’d like to share some thoughts on hardware acceleration for password recovery, its past, present, and future. I will also cover the most frequently asked questions regarding GPUs.

It seems like monarchy is to reign in the cyber world. During the last weeks mass media heavily speak about the need of finding a proper authority who will be responsible for electronic information security issues: Obama seeks one for the White House, whereas EU commissioner for information society and media (Viviane Reding) announces that "Europe needs a ‘Mister Cyber Security’ as we have a ‘Mister Foreign Affairs’, a security tsar with authority to act immediately if a cyber attack is underway.

First of all, sad news: Intel Larrabee is delayed till 2010 (we were expecting it in Q4’2009), according to the reports. With 32 cores onboard (though this number is not confirmed yet), it looks like a very good system for password cracking. Some Larrabee development tools and resources are already available, and of course, we’re porting our code to this platform, and will share the results with you as soon as we’ll be able to (we’re under the NDA with Intel; as well as with Nvidia and AMD :)).

All modern AMD and Intel processors are 64-bit and corresponding Windows versions are also on the market. It is highly recommended to use 64-bit systems (though 32-bit systems perfectly work on 64-bit processors) because in this case more than 3 Gb RAM can be employed, and today we have lots and lots of 64-bit systems, so it’s getting more and more critical. (more…)

Wow, Adobe rethinks PDF security. Curious why? Because of vulnerabilities in Abobe Reader (and so zero-day exploits), of course. From the article:

We wrote about Cost-effective video cards recently, but what about better ones, if the prise does not really matter? Just read Best Of The Best: High-End Graphics Card Roundup at Tom’s Hardware. Large. Expensive. Power-consuming. But really fast — so best choice if you deal with GPU acceleration.

From time to time we’re receiving questions regarding various technologies used in our products, especially Thunder Tables™ and GPU acceleration. Today I’d like to explain what exactly Thunder Tables™ is (and what it’s not).

Time is money, difficult to contradict this fact. And another proven fact is that you lose something exactly when something turns out to be absolutely necessary. Once you lost a password to your Word document or presentation that you were going to give in an hour, or Excel report which was supposed to be sent to your manager yesterday… you will count seconds before you get back your files. (more…)