Showing posts with label Hardware. Show all posts
Sony Playstation used to crack password
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Cell chip has several processing cores to do number crunching
The powerful chip at the heart of Sony's PlayStation gaming console has been used to crack passwords faster than ever before.
Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.
Typically, previous attempts to crack such passwords took days to get the same result.
Eight-character passwords are used to protect PDF and Zip files as well as those produced by Microsoft Office.
The work to turn the PS3 into a password cracker was carried out by Nick Breese, who works for Auckland-based Security Assessment.
The Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is the key to speeding up the time it takes to crack a password.
In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.
The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second. This speed boost was possible because each Cell chip had several processing cores - each one of which could be effectively trying passwords at the same time.
This was important when attempting "brute force" attacks that go through all possible combinations for a password.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Breese said although the PS3 could be used to crack eight-character passwords featuring letters and numbers, stronger encryption systems - such as those used to safeguard web transactions - remained safe.
Mr Breese's research comes soon after work by Russian company Elcomsoft to use graphics cards to speed up password cracking.
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The Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is the key to speeding up the time it takes to crack a password.
In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.
The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second. This speed boost was possible because each Cell chip had several processing cores - each one of which could be effectively trying passwords at the same time.
This was important when attempting "brute force" attacks that go through all possible combinations for a password.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Breese said although the PS3 could be used to crack eight-character passwords featuring letters and numbers, stronger encryption systems - such as those used to safeguard web transactions - remained safe.
Mr Breese's research comes soon after work by Russian company Elcomsoft to use graphics cards to speed up password cracking.
How to Clone a Hard Drive
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Did know that you could clone your current Hard Drive without having to by extra software? Maybe you didn't know that all that you needed, was already set up on your current system? Well, it is... and if you follow this tut, you shouldn't have much of a problem.
Make sure that you have a Master and a Slave setup on your system. The Slave drive, in this case, is where all the data on the Master is going to go to.
First: Perform a Scandisk your Master drive and follow that with a thorough Defrag. If you have an Antivirus program, do a thorough sweep with the AV first, then do the Scandisk, followed by the Defrag.
Second: Do the same thing to the target drive, as you did the Master: Scandisk then a thorough Defrag.
Third: Right-click on the Target drive and click on Format. When the box comes up, click your mouse onto the "Full" button.
Fourth: After Formatting the Target drive, run a Scandisk again and click on the button that says "Autofix Errors".
Fifth: In this final part, you might want to cut-and-paste to code in, unless you are sure that you can do it without making any mistakes:
Click on the "Start" button, then click on the "Run..." button, then place the following into the Run box:
"XCOPY C:\*.*D:\ /c/h/e/k/r" (minus the quotes, of course) then press the "Enter" button.
If you receive an error message, then remove the space from between XCOPY and C:\
Anything that should happen to come up in the DOS box, just click "Y" for "Yes". When its all finished, pull the original Master from the system, designate the Slave as the Master (change your jumpers), then check your new Master out.
This tut has worked and has been tested on all systems except for Windows 2000, so you really shouldn't have any problems. If, by any chance, you should come across a snag, message me and I'll walk you through it.
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First: Perform a Scandisk your Master drive and follow that with a thorough Defrag. If you have an Antivirus program, do a thorough sweep with the AV first, then do the Scandisk, followed by the Defrag.
Second: Do the same thing to the target drive, as you did the Master: Scandisk then a thorough Defrag.
Third: Right-click on the Target drive and click on Format. When the box comes up, click your mouse onto the "Full" button.
Fourth: After Formatting the Target drive, run a Scandisk again and click on the button that says "Autofix Errors".
Fifth: In this final part, you might want to cut-and-paste to code in, unless you are sure that you can do it without making any mistakes:
Click on the "Start" button, then click on the "Run..." button, then place the following into the Run box:
"XCOPY C:\*.*D:\ /c/h/e/k/r" (minus the quotes, of course) then press the "Enter" button.
If you receive an error message, then remove the space from between XCOPY and C:\
Anything that should happen to come up in the DOS box, just click "Y" for "Yes". When its all finished, pull the original Master from the system, designate the Slave as the Master (change your jumpers), then check your new Master out.
This tut has worked and has been tested on all systems except for Windows 2000, so you really shouldn't have any problems. If, by any chance, you should come across a snag, message me and I'll walk you through it.
Remove Scratches from CDs or DVDs
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Saturday, December 8, 2007
I have a large (over 800) collection of CD's, and as the years go by, I'm finding more and more scratches on them. Financial blog Wise Bread was in the same predicament recently, and decided to do a little experimenting with how to get those scratches off once and for all.A few different methods were tried: toothpaste, a banana , and Brasso, with Brasso being the clear winner. I haven't had much luck with anything but a CD buff thingy we got from a garage sale last summer, but that's just me. How do you get rid of scratches on your CDs and DVDs? Let's hear it in the comments.
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