Eighteen Years of GPU Acceleration
November 27th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
Eighteen years ago, before “GPU acceleration” and “AI data center” became household terms, a small hi-tech company changed the rules of cryptography. In 2007, we unveiled a radical idea – using the untapped power of graphics processors to recover passwords, which coincided with the release of video cards capable of performing fixed-point calculations. What began as an experiment would soon redefine performance computing across nearly every field.
NVIDIA about Intel
April 28th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
Wardriving with NVIDIA
April 28th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
More cores, faster password cracking
April 24th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
AMD revealed that its plans a 12-core Opteron processor in 2010, and a 16-core Opteron in 2011. Unfortunately, almost no further/technical details — more cores is definitely good, but we’d like to see whether AMD is able to implement SSE2 effectively. Right now, SSE2 instructions are executed much slower on AMD processors than on Intel ones, while they’re really important for SHA-1 (the most password checking routines are based on). Or may be SSE5 will give provide additional benefits for password cracking?
More on NVIDIA GT300
April 23rd, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
Dangerously Easy Password Recovery
April 23rd, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
There is only one way to break through PGP® encryption – GPU accelerated brute force – and that one is too many. New Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery v. 2.80.206 crunches PGP® passwords 200 times faster using graphic chips.
TROOPERS09 – are you with hackers or what?
April 22nd, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
If you added this blog to your news feeder, then you prefer getting skilled rather than getting owned – as in Troopers’ motto.
Adobe Reader [in]security
April 22nd, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
From F-Secure advises against using Adobe Reader article:
Wireless Security Survey
April 22nd, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
The key findings of the survey of the 35860 wireless networks (in 12 Indian cities) are:
Six-Core Opterons (Istanbul)
April 22nd, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
According to Tweak Down, AMD will start shipping them next month. We’ll see how do they compare with Intel Gulftown.
