Leveraging User Profiles for Smarter Password Attacks
November 24th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
Most real-world passwords aren’t random – they follow the owner’s habits, preferences, and personal history. Names, birthdays, pets, team loyalties, and even old usernames affect how people build their “secret” strings. By turning this everyday information into structured, prioritized password candidates, analysts can reach higher success rates than with generic dictionaries or blind brute force. This article explains how to transform user data into a focused attack strategy.
Thunder Tables™ Explained
May 21st, 2009 by Andrey Belenko
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).
Frequently Asked Question: Advanced Office Password RECOVERY or Advanced Office Password BREAKER?
May 20th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
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.
Cost-effective video cards
May 20th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
Too much security won’t spoil the router, will it make it better?
May 18th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
A number of D-link routers are now equipped with captcha feature. Sounds interesting.
CUDA-enabled applications
May 18th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
Tom’s Hardware has tested two mainstream NVIDIA cards (GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX) on several CUDA-enabled applications. The applications were:
Week of Scams
May 15th, 2009 by Katerina Korolkova, Direktur Humas
have a great and secure weekend 🙂
Overclocked AMD/ATI card
May 14th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
AMD has hit another megahertz milestone record today. In fact, this is ATI Radeon HD 4890 card, overclocked to 1 GHz at the factory (normally, it runs at 850 MHz); surprisingly, air cooled (I thought that water cooling would be needed).
Laptop security – myths and mistakes
May 13th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Today’s businesses are very mobile. Sometimes you don’t even need to have a conventional office, it becomes virtual, it is always with you in your mobile phones, netbooks and laptops. Such mobile mini-offices stuffed with corporate documents and reports, partners’ data, confidencial correspondence, access passwords are in danger of being stolen, both virtually and physically. You can try to protect your laptop using laptop security cable locks but what if it was stolen? Let all your information go into adversary’s hands? Do you _really_ think that your Windows logon password is an impenetrable barrier for the adversary? Have you heard of Elcomsoft System Recovery? You still think your laptop is secure because you have BIOS password and/or partial drive encryption? Read an article by Kevin Beaver ‘Securing corporate data on your laptops’ , take off rose-colored glasses and revise your laptop security as suggested in Kevin’s step-by-step outline.
NIST drafts new enterprise password management (open to publication, distribution and adaptation!)
May 13th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Probably you’ve already heard about this vicious circle thousand times:
