You’re probably aware that our Distributed Password Recovery works with Lotus Notes ID files (as well as with two dozen other file formats, of course). Some sad news: in latest versions of Notes (8.5), encryption has been improved. In older versions, only 64-bit and 128-bit RC2 options were available, but now you can also use AES (128-bit or 256-bit). Well, encryption itself does not actually matter, but the problem is that password verification routine is not much better (worse?) as well: 5,000/10,000 SHA-1 cycles have been added. EDPR will be updated accordingly to support new format (you can subscribe to our mailing list to be notified), of course, but don’t expect the high recovery speed: we can get several hundred passwords per second only. For older versions of Notes, the speed was ~100,000 passwords per second or higher.

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.

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?