Time for shoulder surfing is gone, today we have more sophisticated ways to track what you are typing on your keyboard. A series of appearing keyboard attacks yet again prove its incapability of keeping secretes. Let’s see what we have…

About a month ago annual Eurocrypt conference took place in Cologne, Germany. This is rather academic event (as most if not all events held by IACR) so it is not always easy to read its proceedings filled with formulas and theorems. Nonetheless there are usually couple of very interesting works presented at each such event. Let me tell you a little bit about this year’s highlights.

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.

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…)

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).

Apart from official IT Security events, London ethical hackers like to organize monthly meetings such as DC4420 in clubs, sometimes changing their location. In an informal manner they exchange their experience, represent new ideas and technologies.

We never thought that our participation would bring such kind of trouble (or at least a disappointment).

There is only one way to break through PGP® encryption – GPU accelerated brute force – and that one is too many. New Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery v. 2.80.206 crunches PGP® passwords 200 times faster using graphic chips.

If you added this blog to your news feeder, then you prefer getting skilled rather than getting owned – as in Troopers’ motto.

And now…. we have Rainbow Tables for Microsoft Excel docs with 40-bit encryption. So, it became possible to reach near-instant recovery of 97% of spreadsheets created in MS Excel 97-2003. Unfortunately, due to specificity of Excel spreadsheets format it’s unreal to get 100%-recovery, still, you can use brute force to cover the rest 3%.