Looks Can Lie: Is That Really an NVMe Drive?

March 17th, 2026 by Oleg Afonin

Many storage devices and adapter boards look alike. When holding a module with a connector that looks suspiciously like the M.2, how do you know exactly what you are dealing with? Is that M.2 board a SATA drive, a fast NVMe device or a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo? Will a drive removed from an Apple computer work in a simple mechanical adapter, or will it require the original Apple device to access? A physical connector does not guarantee the underlying technology.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Military Strike Fighter F-35 Materials Hacked

April 21st, 2009 by Olga Koksharova

As posted by Rosalie Marshall in her today’s article, secret F-35 military plane design materials have been stolen presumably by Chinese hackers (?):

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