Elcomsoft turns your PC into a password cracking supercomputer (gulp)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 24th 2007 9:16AM
posted October 24th 2007 9:16AM
[Via NewScientist, thanks Sultan]
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posted October 24th 2007 9:16AM
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That's why I always have my passwords set to "password". Whenever someone cracks it they get really mad at themselves for putting in all that effort.
An even better one would be "what is a password?"
It used to be fun, when network admins were playing around with l0phtcrack, to set your password to "" (That's "<NO PASSWORD>" in case this isn't HTML-Encoded), as that was the default string l0phtcrack presented when there was no password for an account, causing much confusion and chagrin. ;)
Hmm, their website does list PGP. The thing about brute force attacks is that they can very easily be modified to crack any encryption to which you know the algorithm. The speed at which they perform is just a product of the complexity of the encryption, and the computational power of the system doing the cracking. If you want to see an awesome cracking machine check out http://nsa.unaligned.org/
Ridiculous.. Just wait until there is no incentive for software developers to produce new software because there is no money in it. No one benefits in those circumstances; especially ISV's like myself. I "understand" why some people steal software that is highly overpriced. But when the same software app would have taken a person a year or more to develop for themselves to use yet they still can't pay $50 for it...
Sorry, didn't mean to reply to your post Johnny.
I don't pay for any of the FOSS software I use, but the developers are still getting paid. Maybe you should look into the idea of not paying for development but for support.
Greetings, Professor Falken. Shall we play a game?
Let's play Thermonuclear War
I wish I could run Matlab on this thing...
didn't Microsoft BUY Elcomsoft? I swear I read an article saying they did
Sheeet, I don't even have the software yet and I already want to cause some sort of mischief!
That's it... I'm going to the vid store right now to get me a copy of "Live Free or Die Hard" movie and I'm going to watch it 20 times straight through! THEN we will see who is da MAN!
Fragging and Cracking at the same time... DAM! Somebody get me a Bud Light and some Doritos!
:D
oh no, not true,
Under a special agreement with Microsoft, ElcomSoft System Recovery is based upon Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), a hardware-independent minimal Windows system that replaces the antique DOS boot disk that was used to set up new computer systems.
http://www.pr.com/press-release/55098
LOL, figures it's a Russian patenting a password cracking app. Almost all the pirate websites selling software on the web are run by Russians.
IT would take a freaking super computer to crack my... O wait... I don't have a password...
Yes, but can it crack passwords while playing Doom?
Oh my God, since we're dealing with GPUs, that Doom comment was actually relevant this time.
@Trent:
Brute force doesn't do you any good if you cant get to the password (shadow) file.
Either way, no one is truly concerned with this technology, its just another script kiddie tool. That's of course to not say its not dangerous.
Quantum computing is what we're afraid of.
Use this for something more benign please like cracking Winrar passwords :D
You won't find it anywhere for under 200$
(cough)Newsbins(Cough)Giganews(cough)
http://www.binsearch.info/?q=Elcomsoft+Distributed+Password+Recovery&max=100&adv_age=200&server=
So if this is basic Brute Force, would it stand to reason that they will be smart enough to make it multi threaded and able to split the workload into multiple chunks?
Basically, you could take a motherboard supporting Quad PCIE x16 Slots (Mac Pro anyone?) and stuff in 4 x 8800 Ultra Cards into a single machine. Because your not playing games, you dont need SLI to work on all 4.
Would that make the cracking process even faster?
The scary part is you could stuff all that power, along with a QX6850 and several TB of storage into an average looking tower case.
Wow. Wow. WOW. The program could cost $13,000 dollars and it won't matter. That puppy is going to be ripped, cracked, and packed on Bittorent so fucking fast. If it is released commercially, it is going to hit the hands of every network engineer, hacker, and script kiddy out there.
If it supports SLI, holy shit. Somebody that *wants* to really crack passwords will be able to put together one HELL of a cracking system. If it supports DISTRIBUTED brute force attacks with multiple programs over a network...... near instant cracking machine for a group of 10+ hackers with a bunch of hardware. Let's not even think of a somebody with a Storm Worm botnet army that can adapt this program in a distributed manner.
This is going to cause a lot of problems for awhile, but it will really force people to use more complex and longer passwords, which is going to piss off users a lot :) I am sure a lot of network admins out there are quietly laughing themselves to death now that there is an EXTREMELY compelling reason to force all network users to conform to strong password requirements.
I use 24 character passwords with unprintable characters, which means you have to worry about 250+ characters which vastly increases the permutations. That is probably the only way you could be safe.
If this program can crack a 10 character password with a base of 90 characters in a day, then a 20 character password with a base of 200 characters will be many orders stronger and push the bar back up to months and years.
This is not necessarily MS's fault either. Granted they completely suck at security, but they could rely on 2 or 3 months to brute force a password and in that time it could be highly likely to change with appropriate policies. Now they can't.
some one change my administrator password on network workgroup.....can anyone tell me how it can be done using the command promt.....plz reply soon.....