Note to PGP legal dept: I’m not going to put the ® sign every time when I mention PGP. I’m just tired; we already did that in our press release and on our web site, and I think it’s enough. No, really? Well, I’ll repeat one more time: all names like PGP are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners in the UK, USA, Russia and probably somewhere else – e.g. in Albania. There are too many countries to mention, sorry :). Why should I care about (R)? Keep reading, and you’ll see the reason.

Considering Intel Core i7? Read Nvidia Says Core i7 Isn’t Worth It and nVidia calls Core i7 a waste of money first. We’d agree that investing into GPU(s) is really a good idea, especially if you need to crack passwords.

17" screen, Intel Core 2 Extreme processor (four cores) plus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M — an excellent device not only for gaming, but also for wardriving. Get it from Sager, and just add Wireless Security Auditor.

Finally, nVidia’s GT300 specifications revealed! 512 cores (remember that GT200 has only 240), which means about 3 TFLOPS — can you imagine that? We’re also expecting the new generation of Tesla supercomputers based on those GPUs. GT300 also gives direct hardware access for CUDA 3.0, DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL.

New member of Core i7 family: six cores, hyper-threading, and some new instructions — including ones for AES encryption. Unfortunately, useless for our password-cracking purposes: most password-checking routines are based on SHA-1. But anyway, an ability to run 12 threads at a time will definitely increase the performance. We’ll see (in Q1’2010). More info at Tom’s Hardware.

According to The Inquirer, Nvidia GT300 promised in October. Should be a good video card for GPU-accelerated password cracking :).

Nice lyrics stirs up hacker’s morning drowsy feelings 🙂
 

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. 

Google made a video tour inside their premises. Looks like an amazing wire-n-hardware gathering: