Intelligent Load Balancing: Optimizing Password Recovery Across Heterogeneous Units
November 14th, 2024 by Oleg Afonin
In the latest update of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery (EDPR), we’ve introduced a revamped load-balancing feature. The new feature aims to enhance resource utilization on local workstations across diverse hardware configurations. This update has drastically reduced the time required to break passwords in certain hardware configurations, thanks to a refined load distribution algorithm. In this article, we’ll share some technical details on how load balancing leverages a mix of GPUs and CPU cores.
New ATI Radeon card
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
The only our product that works with ATI cards (right now) is Wireless Security Auditor, but interesting news anyway: ATI Radeon HD 4770 Info Leaked. I’ll second the editor’s opinion that it will make a good competition to NVIDIA’a 9800GT (of course, supported by EWSA, too).
“I bet you want the password, bet you wanna log in?”
April 16th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Nice lyrics stirs up hacker’s morning drowsy feelings 🙂
Smart Password Mutations Explained
April 15th, 2009 by Katerina Korolkova, Direktur Humas
Strong passwords are mutated passwords. Everyone who publishes recommendations on creating secure password says that you have to use both upper- and lower-case letters and inject some tricky special characters. Such recommendations may result in p@$$words and pAsswOrds, and p_a_s_s_w_o_r_d_s. The fact is that modern password recovery software uses dictionary attack to get one’s password back. Dictionary attack means searching lists of dictionary words and common phrases that can be found on the Internet or delivered with the software. It is easy to grab that dictionary words and word phrases make bad passwords, but one has to understand that adding special characters to these words and phrases does’t do them any good. Such password can be easily cracked when smart mutations option is on.
Great hot water supply
April 15th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Google made a video tour inside their premises. Looks like an amazing wire-n-hardware gathering:
Windows Passwords
April 15th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
Need more information on passwords in Active Directory environment — password policies, default settings, fine-graining? Then read Windows Passwords: Making them Secure article at WindowsSecurity.com. But we can also recommend using Proactive Password Auditor on a regular basis, to see how secure your passwords really are.
Nvidia Quadro FX 4800
April 15th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
You should be aware that Distributed Password Recovery and Wireless Security Auditor work not only with NVIDIA GeForce cards and Tesla supercomputers (in terms of GPU acceleration), but with professional Quadro cards, too. We never compared the performance of GeForce and Quadro, though. Curious? Then read the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800: Workstation Graphics At Its Finest? article published at Tom’s Hardware today.
Fastest video card
April 14th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
As you may guess, it is ATI Radeon HD 4890 X2. It is not available yet, but coming soon. We’re very impatient to try our WPA password recovery software there.
Surveillance Self-Defense Project fills the gaps in your security policy
April 13th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Michael Kassner placed an article about Surveillance Self-Defense in the TechRepublic, where he gives brief outline of the SSD website. Though some can endlessly brood over the grounds for the project foundation, for me one is clear that this site can be very much helpful to put all principal computer security guidelines together and close the gaps in your own security.
There are plenty of excellent knowledge nuggets in section Defensive Technology which includes, Emails, Web Browsers (in one of my previous posts I also wrote about threats posed by switched-on AutoComplete), IMs, File and Disk Encryption… At this points I’d focus your attention at the File and Disk Encryption section which starts with:
ATI, NVIDIA and WPA/WPA2 passwords
April 10th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
In case if you missed it: new ATI Catalyst drivers (9.4) now available (you can read the release notes for details). For some reason, some driver files have been renamed (well, not in 9.4, but in 9.3 released a bit earlier, though that version was really buggy and we cannot recommend to use it anyway), and our WPA password recovery (audit) software was not able to recognize Radeon cards anymore.
Lotus Notes ID files password cracking
April 10th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
