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.
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.
23 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295s packed into one system
April 8th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
Looks like a very good system for password cracking (using GPU-accelerated Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery), isn’t it? Especially assuming that even single GeForce GTX 295 is faster than Intel Octa-Core CPU (to be released later this year).
ATI and NVIDIA engaged in long-running battle
April 1st, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
ATI and NVIDIA arranged a new graphic cards fight, claims TweakTown:
Remember Password On This Computer? – Never more!!
April 1st, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Fresh life experience…A very good friend of mine told me a story I would like to share with you with her kind permission. Recently she has found a new job in a medium size company. She was perfectly satisfied with her new position and new tasks. She also got a well equipped working place including her principal tool for work – computer, which actually she inherited from an ex-employee who lately moved to another company. The company could have bought her a new computer, but what for, if there was working one absolutely ownerless. Windows XP already installed along with numerous useful applications, even her favorite Safari was there.
Password Recovery Tambourine
April 1st, 2009 by Katerina Korolkova, Direktur Humas
Today morning ElcomSoft announced a new tool for password recovery. This one is a hardware, a supernatural amulet of Siberian shamans. Password Recovery Tambourine appears in 4 editions: Pentagon, Glamourous, Russian and Open Source. This hardware requires a special 15-month training with authentic Yakutsk shaman guild. However, if you are patient enough to spend a year and a half in Siberia and not afraid of permanent frost there, then after the training no password would be strong enough for you. You’ll crack it in seconds with your preferable edition of Password Recovery Tambourine. Cultural note The idea of creating Password Recovery Tambourine grew out of the popular belief between Russian system administrators that when nothing else helps you have to rest your hopes on dancing with a ‘BU-BEN (Russian for ‘tambourine’). They say, dancing with a tambourine helps to reanimate one’s server, find bugs, set up operational system and what not. Implementation of this belief to password recovery was not easy, at least 200 ritual dances have been performed during the development stage. Finally,
EFS-Encrypted Data Recovery
March 31st, 2009 by Katerina Korolkova, Direktur Humas
The Encrypting File System (EFS) was first introduced in Windows 2000 and, as Microsoft claims, is an excellent encryption system with no back door.
