Posts Tagged ‘passwords’

Teach Yourself Secure Passwords

Monday, March 30th, 2009

lifehacker has started a series of posts on choosing and using secure passwords. Few days ago they published a list of handy tips from their readers on how to create passwords you can rely on. One of the readers admitted that in a company he works for IT administrators require password change every 30 days and

it just results in workers picking the easiest password that meets the requirements – as in a MM/YYYY-style password.

Sounds like it’s time to rethink password policies. What are your ideas?

Pen Testing with Distributed Password Recovery and GPUs

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

The German c’t magazine (issue 06/09) has published an article about cracking of NTLM-hashes with graphic cards. In this article pen test experts from SySS GmbH bring up a touchy question of how fast an intruder can break into your system. How long should your Windows logon password be, so that you could keep having your beauty sleep?

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery was run on dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4850e, 2.5 GHz, with Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX installed. The cost of the test system is worth the effort. One can fetch it for only $1K.

Now, what is the outcome?
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