Want to get an overall picture of all potential threats to your unprotected pc and how it can be used when hacked? Have a look at the vivid graph drafted by Brian Krebs. It’s not only credit cards and passwords… Hey, Brian says this monstrous list not complete, I wonder if you have something to add? 

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.

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.”

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.

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…)

Considering a (new) AMD/ATI or NVIDIA video card for password cracking with Wireless Security Auditor or Distributed Password Recovery (to get the most from GPU acceleration technology — at an affordable price)? Read the Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May ’09 at Tom’s Hardware. I especially like the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.