Password managers such as LastPass are designed from the ground up to withstand brute-force attacks on the password database. Using encryption and thousands of hash iterations, the protection is made to slow down access to the encrypted vault that contains all of the user’s stored passwords. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to unlock LastPass password vault instantly without running a length attack.

Modern applications use highly secure and thus deliberately slow algorithms for verifying passwords. For this reason, the password recovery process may take a lot of time and require extreme computational resources. You can build your own powerful cluster to accelerate brute-force attacks, but if you only need to recover a password every once in a while, maintaining your own cluster may not be the best investment. Cloud services can help do a one-off job faster. For a long time, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery had supported Amazon cloud services with automatic deployment on Amazon’s powerful GPU-accelerated servers. The latest update brings support for Microsoft Azure, adding the ability to automatically deploy Password Recovery Agents to virtual machines created in Microsoft Azure. In this article I will describe the deployment steps.

VeraCrypt is a de-facto successor to TrueCrypt, one of the most popular cryptographic tools for full-disk encryption of internal and external storage devices. Compared to TrueCrypt, which it effectively replaced, VeraCrypt employs a newer and more secure format for encrypted containers, and significantly expands the number of supported encryption algorithms and hash functions. Learn how to break VeraCrypt containers with distributed password attacks.

Why wasting time recovering passwords instead of just breaking in? Why can we crack some passwords but still have to recover the others? Not all types of protection are equal. There are multiple types of password protection, all having their legitimate use cases. In this article, we’ll explain the differences between the many types of password protection.

The first Microsoft Office product was announced back in 1988. During the past thirty years, Microsoft Office has evolved from a simple text editor to a powerful combination of desktop apps and cloud services. With more than 1.2 billion users of the desktop Office suite and over 60 million users of Office 365 cloud service, Microsoft Office files are undoubtedly the most popular tools on the market. With its backward file format compatibility, Microsoft Office has become a de-facto standard for documents interchange.

GPU acceleration is the thing when you need to break a password. Whether you use brute force, a dictionary of common words or a highly customized dictionary comprised of the user’s existed passwords pulled from their Web browser, extracted from their smartphone or downloaded from the cloud, sheer performance is what you need to make the job done in reasonable time.

This article opens a new series dedicated to breaking passwords. It’s no secret that simply getting a good password recovery tool is not enough to successfully break a given password. Brute-force attacks are inefficient for modern formats (e.g. encrypted Office 2013 documents), while using general dictionaries can still be too much for speedy attacks and too little to actually work. In this article, we’ll discuss the first of the two relatively unknown vectors of attack that can potentially break 30 to 70 per cent of real-world passwords in a matter of minutes. The second method will be described in the follow-up article. (more…)

Not all passwords provide equal protection. Some formats are more resistant to brute-force attacks than others. As an example, Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 employ a smart encryption scheme that is very slow to decrypt. Even the fastest available GPU units found in NVIDIA’s latest GeForce GTX 1080 will only allow trying some 7100 passwords per second.

How often do you think forensic specialists have to deal with encrypted containers? Compared with office documents and archives that are relatively infrequent, every second case involves an encrypted container. It may vary, but these evaluations are based on a real survey conducted by our company.

During the last several years, progress on the CPU performance front has seemingly stopped. Granted, last-generation CPUs are cool, silent and power-efficient. Anecdotal evidence: my new laptop (a brand new Macbook) is about as fast as the Dell ultrabook it replaced. The problem? I bought the Dell laptop some five years ago. Granted, the Dell was thicker and noisier. It’s battery never lasted longer than a few hours. But it was about as fast as the new Macbook.