In brief, here is the "problem": for years (I think starting from Windows 3.0 released almost 20 years ago), the passwords are being masked as you type them (in most programs what have any kind of password protection, and an operating system itself), i.e. replaced with asterisks or black circles. What for? To prevent the password from being read by someone who stands behind you.

 When we meet our customers at trade fairs in Germany, we are always asked questions about legality of our tools. The reason for this is that German law on so-called “hacking tools” is very strict. At the same time the wording of the respective paragraphs is unclear and ambiguous.

 Today’s technologies allow staying online practically 24 hrs a day, periodically falling into a sleeping mode. The Internet became easily accessible and numerous devices can connect us to the web from everywhere, and every time when we surf the web we are being registered, at least via IP address of our devices. 

Considering a (new) AMD/ATI or NVIDIA video card for password cracking with Wireless Security Auditor or Distributed Password Recovery (to get the most from GPU acceleration technology — at an affordable price)? Read the Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May ’09 at Tom’s Hardware. I especially like the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.

Tom’s Hardware has tested two mainstream NVIDIA cards (GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX) on several CUDA-enabled applications. The applications were:

If you are going to purchase a new computer (or make it yourself), you should definitely think about graphics — for CAD/CAM, gaming, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence at home or password cracking. Of course, thinking of budget, too. I hope you’re already aware of NVIDIA SLI which allows to use multiple video cards, but how a single dual-GPU compares to two single-GPU ones? Read GeForce GTX 295 Vs. GTX 275 SLI: When Two Are Better Than One.

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.

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?