Items tagged with Crack
Whether true or not, Apple’s Mac OSX is typically perceived as being more secure than Windows. But according to Passware, Inc., a leading maker of password recovery and e-Discovery software for Federal and State agencies, law enforcement, and military organizations, among many other corporate clients, OSX has its fair share of vulnerabilities too. In fact, according to Passware, a recent vulnerability found in OSX—including the latest “Lion” release—allows the company’s Passware Kit to ascertain even complex passwords in a matter of minutes. The tool exploits a vulnerability in the OS when a system with Automatic Login enabled is put into sleep mode. Although...
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You've probably never heard of Pico Computing, and that's just fine. The company works mostly undercover, out of the line of sight from most citizens. It sounds like a story from a James Bond movie, but the company's execution is real: they're in the business of cracking codes, digging into top secret transmissions and giving their customers the ability to figure out what enemies are saying. It's a modern day spy story, and there's great potential for Pico to grow monumentally. The company was founded in 2004 in Seattle, and they currently sell a "a desktop-size supercomputer aimed at the modern-day equivalent of Bletchley Park's cipher-geeks: military and government agencies that need to turn...
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said on Monday that they have developed a method for predicting many if not all of a person's Social Security Number based on publicly available data. The findings were released in an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here's what the researchers said in the preface to the report: Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs....
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We've always been warned to be vigilant about what information we provide when online. Between phishing, malware, and DNS spoofing it's difficult to blindly trust any online entity these days. But if we have a secure connection to a known site, we're okay then, right? Not always... Someone might still be listening in. Just because you think your connection is secure, doesn't mean that it is. In fact, as we reported a few weeks ago, researchers have found a way to wirelessly listen in on your keyboard activity--sort of a passive, non-intrusive keylogger. Perhaps a bit more common is the act of listening in on wireless networking communications. Even such efforts as disabling router SSIDs and using...
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We're not sure what's more frightening about this, the fact that the Russians figured out how to do it or that WiFi networks are effectively now completely insecure. ElcomSoft claims they can "recover" WPA and WPA2 encypted passwords using any NVIDIA-based graphics subsystem in a workstation, desktop or even a notebook, to crack WPA encyption over 100 times fastest than with a standard CPU. This might not mean much to the average home user because, let's face it, serious thugs aren't bothering to hack into your home network to leech your bandwidth or steal a single user's personal information. However, for the corporate sector, this "press release" is a huge wake-up...
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Google buys things. Lots of things. The companies that get purchased by Google are usually pretty excited about the prospect. Google's offices have the unstructured vibe that startup entrepreneurs love, and of course everybody likes money -- Google certainly has that. But it's starting to dawn on the startup businesses that Google might buy that they could disappear into Google and never be heard from again, or see their startup butchered like a farm animal to have the choicest bits added to Google's existing stable of widgets. Besides watching your Google-purchased baby languish or die, you're just an employee there, and Google decides what digital mine you'll be hacking at binary ore in now....
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You'll recall that in February security researchers found a way to break into encrypted hard drives by using a trick that relies on the fact that RAM dissipates its contents slower if cooled.The research paper, by Princeton, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Wind River Systems was titled "Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys" (.PDF"). Over the weekend, timed to coincide with the Last HOPE hacker conference over the weekend in New York, the source code was published to the Web.Of course, this technique only works if the laptop hasn't already been turned off, which would have enabled the memory to fully dissipate. This probably isn't the method most people on...
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Utilizing a little known fact about RAM, researchers have devised a way to crack disk encryption. The attack takes only a few minutes to conduct and uses the disk encryption key that's stored in the computer's RAM. The attack works because content as well as encryption keys stored in RAM linger in the system, even after the machine is powered off, enabling an attacker to use the key to collect any content still in RAM after reapplying power to the machine. "We've broken disk encryption products in exactly the case when they seem to be most important these days: laptops that contain sensitive corporate data or personal information about business customers," said J. Alex Halderman, one of the researchers,...
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Phishing scams grow more sophisticated every day. And as sites like banks and credit card companies become hardened against attack, crafty information thieves find ways to steal information further out in the digital landscape. Facebook users reported a phishing attack on Wednesday that is disguised as a message left for them from a trusted friend on their Facebook "wall," promising juicy pics, of course. The link looks like a standard Facebook link --if you don't notice the slashes have been replaced with periods.But the link leads to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and...
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Microsoft boasts that Windows Vista is possibly one of the most secure operating systems to date and sports a plethora of security orientated features, but pirate organization Paradox is still giving the new OS a run for its money. Paradox's new crack installs and fully activates Windows Vista without the product ever contacting Microsoft to verify the installation. The crack exploits special product keys used for installing Vista on distributor machines quickly and easily without 'phoning home' while emulating special BIOS code which allows Vista to be installed on any hardware . Microsoft claims eventually it will find these illegal installations by...
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If you build it, it will be cracked. That's been the story behind most encryption, and the latest generation of media formats seem no different. Last year, Microsoft's HD-DVD encryption was cracked by someone who goes by the name of "Muslix64", and this year he adds Blu-Ray to his list of defeated media formats. This is a pretty amazing feat considering he/she had no access to Blu-Ray hardware. "Although Muslix64 did not have any Blu-ray equipment at his disposal, he was still able to recover the keys with the help of Janvitos' memory dump file and media file. Blu-ray media files are divided into individual aligned units. The first 16 bytes of each unit are not encrypted, with...
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Engadget has a story, complete with a short video, on-line that claims the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) DRM technology incorporated into HD-DVD has been cracked. Before anyone in the HD-DVD camps starts boo-hooing, or anyone in the Blu-Ray camp starts cheering, I'd wager this actually helps boost the popularity of HD-DVDs over Blu-Ray. "Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys...
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