Last week a colleague of mine, Andrey Belenko, gave a speech at the Troopers conference in Munich. Olga wrote about it in this blog. All the talks at Troopers were awesome. Soon the videos and slide shows will be available for downloading on Troopers website.

Strong passwords are mutated passwords. Everyone who publishes recommendations on creating secure password says that you have to use both upper- and lower-case letters and inject some tricky special characters. Such recommendations may result in p@$$words and pAsswOrds, and p_a_s_s_w_o_r_d_s. The fact is that modern password recovery software uses dictionary attack to get one’s password back. Dictionary attack means searching lists of dictionary words and common phrases that can be found on the Internet or delivered with the software. It is easy to grab that dictionary words and word phrases make bad passwords, but one has to understand that adding special characters to these words and phrases does’t do them any good. Such password can be easily cracked when smart mutations option is on. 

Today morning ElcomSoft announced a new tool for password recovery. This one is a hardware, a supernatural amulet of Siberian shamans. Password Recovery Tambourine appears in 4 editions: Pentagon, Glamourous, Russian and Open Source. This hardware requires a special 15-month training with authentic Yakutsk shaman guild. However, if you are patient enough to spend a year and a half in Siberia and not afraid of permanent frost there, then after the training no password would be strong enough for you. You’ll crack it in seconds with your preferable edition of Password Recovery Tambourine. Cultural note The idea of creating Password Recovery Tambourine grew out of the popular belief between Russian system administrators that when nothing else helps you have to rest your hopes on dancing with a ‘BU-BEN (Russian for ‘tambourine’). They say, dancing with a tambourine helps to reanimate one’s server, find bugs, set up operational system and what not. Implementation of this belief to password recovery was not easy, at least 200 ritual dances have been performed during the development stage. Finally,

The Encrypting File System (EFS) was first introduced in Windows 2000 and, as Microsoft claims, is an excellent encryption system with no back door.

lifehacker has started a series of posts on choosing and using secure passwords. Few days ago they published a list of handy tips from their readers on how to create passwords you can rely on. One of the readers admitted that in a company he works for IT administrators require password change every 30 days and

The German c’t magazine (issue 06/09) has published an article about cracking of NTLM-hashes with graphic cards. In this article pen test experts from SySS GmbH bring up a touchy question of how fast an intruder can break into your system. How long should your Windows logon password be, so that you could keep having your beauty sleep?