Earlier this month on Jimmy Kimmel Live, random people on the street were asked to share their main internet password. Amazingly, some did... on camera, no less.

(Viral Viral Videos) Read the rest

Troy Hunt, proprietor of the Have I Been Pwned? service, has made 306,000,000 known-cracked passwords available as a download -- you can grab the set and make sure that yours isn't among them, as these cracked passwords are the ones that are likely being used by hackers when they do brute-force attacks against encrypted password files. Read the rest

An analysis of passwords found in the 2009 breach of Rockyou -- 32 million accounts -- finds a large number of Biblical references ("jesus"," "heaven", "faith", etc), including a number of Bible verse references ("john316"). Read the rest

I-Dressup is a social media site aimed at teen and tween girls, where users play and interact with fashion. Six days ago, Ars Technica's Dan Goodin contacted I-Dressup to tell them that they were leaking more than 5.5 million cleartext passwords, and that a hacker had already downloaded 2.2 million of them. Read the rest

800,000 usernames and passwords from Brazzers, a giant porn site; 98 million passwords from Rambler.ru ("Russia's Yahoo") and, coming soon, the entire user database for VKontakte/VK.com, Russia's answer to Facebook. Read the rest

Gus the hacker puppeteer writes, "Last weekend was the Hackers On Planet Earth conference (where, ICYMI, Cory was the keynote address). I always come away from HOPE wishing there were easier ways to share what I learned there with friends and family. Fortunately, the Internet Society has been streaming and storing videos of HOPE talks for the past two conferences. (My own talk, on getting into the minds of everyday computer users, should be up there eventually.)" Read the rest

Hate passwords? Google does too, and may begin doing away with conventional passwords on Android devices this year. At Google I/O, the company announced the next steps in its plans to begin using a password alternative: "trust scores" that determine your creds based on various data points. Developed by Google's Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, the Trust API will roll out to "several very large" financial institutions within the next few weeks. Read the rest

It's World Password Day and you can celebrate it by fixing your crappy passwords. Read the rest

Now that 11.7 million Ashley Madison users' passwords been shown to be crackable, we're learning that password security has not improved since the last giant dump of user passwords. Read the rest

In Tell Me Who You Are, and I Will Tell You Your Lock Pattern, Marte Løge presented some of her Master's Thesis research on the guessability of Android lock-patterns -- and guess what? Read the rest

The IRS sent extensive dossiers on 100,000 US taxpayers to identity thieves who used weak "secret security" questions to trick the agency's "Get Transcript" service. Read the rest

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson Dan Goodin follows up on Nate Anderson's excellent piece on the nuts and bolts of password cracking with a further attempt to decrypt an encrypted password file leaked from LivingSocial, this time with the aid of experts. The password file they were working on was encrypted with the relatively weak (and now deprecated) SHA1 hashing algorithm, and they were only attacking it with a single GPU on a commodity PC, and were able to extract over 90% of the passwords in the file.

The discussion of the guesswork and refinement techniques used in extracting passwords is absolutely fascinating and really is a must-read. However, the whole exercise is still a bit inconclusive -- in the end, we know that a badly encrypted password file is vulnerable to an underpowered password-cracking device. But what we need to know is whether a well-encrypted password file will stand up to a good password-cracking system.

The specific type of hybrid attack that cracked that password is known as a combinator attack. It combines each word in a dictionary with every other word in the dictionary. Because these attacks are capable of generating a huge number of guesses—the square of the number of words in the dict—crackers often work with smaller word lists or simply terminate a run in progress once things start slowing down. Other times, they combine words from one big dictionary with words from a smaller one. Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict...

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson decided to try cracking passwords (from a leaked file of MD5 hashes), to see how difficult it was. After a very long false start (he forgot to decompress the word-list file) that's covered in a little too much detail, Anderson settles down to cracking hashes in earnest, and provides some good data on the nuts and bolts of password security:

By this point I had puzzled out how Hashcat worked, so I dumped the GUI and switched back to the command-line version running on my much faster MacBook Air. My goal was to figure out how many hashes I could crack in, say, under 30 minutes, as well as which attacks were most efficient. I began again on my 17,000-hash file, this time having Hashcat remove each hash from the file once it was cracked. This way I knew exactly how many hashes each attack solved.

This set of attacks brought the number of uncracked MD5 hashes down from 17,000 to 8,790, but clearly the best "bang for the buck" came from running the RockYou list with the best64.rule iterations. In just 90 seconds, this attack would uncover 45 percent of the hashed passwords; additional attacks did little more, even those that took 16 minutes to run.

Cracking a significant number of the remaining passwords would take some much more serious effort. Applying the complex d3ad0ne.rule file to the massive RockYou dictionary, for instance, would require more than two hours of fan-spinning number-crunching. And brute force attacks using 6-character passwords only picked up a few additional results.

Security Ledger reports on a breakthrough in password-cracking, using 25 graphics cards in parallel to churn through astounding quantities of password possibilities in unheard-of timescales. It's the truly the end of the line for passwords protected by older hashing algorithms and illustrates neatly how yesterday's "password that would take millions of years to break" is this year's "password broken in an afternoon," and has profound implications for the sort of password hash-dumps we've seen in the past two years.

A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides available here), has moved the goalposts, again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking  program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs and communicating at  10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over  Infiniband switched fabric.

Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete.

In a test, the researcher’s system was able to churn through 348 billion NTLM password hashes per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using NTLM (NT Lan Manager), for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference.

New 25 GPU Monster Devours Passwords In Seconds [Security Ledger]

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Paul Moreno, an Ecuadoran blogger, discovered a flaw in the country's national online identity database, which he demonstrated by hijacking the identity of President Rafael Correa. He was briefly arrested, but was released after a vociferous Twitter campaign that prompted action from the president, who personally ordered Moreno's release. Moreno triumphantly announced his victory on Twitter.

Citing a Wired story on password security, Moreno set out on Nov. 26 to demonstrate a security flaw in DatoSeguro with an attention-getting proof of concept scheme: accessing President Correa’s account. He began by doxing the president, and once equipped with Correa’s date of birth and a national identification number — obtained via online searches — he had two of the three pieces of information he needed. The third was a set of two numbers from an identity card, which he simply guessed. With that, he had access to Correa’s account.

“Out of curiosity, I noticed one time that the fingertip digits in the IDS are all very similar,” he wrote on his blog. “There’s a V or an E or an A followed by various numbers: V23444 – E5444 and so on…combinations that are very simplistic, apparently. The system asked me for the third and fourth numbers of the fingertip digits. With the first combination, I got the numbers right and my account was created. After verifying the email the system sends, I had access to all Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado’s so-called secure data. It took me about half an hour, maybe less.”

Blogger Jailed After Password-Hacking Ecuador’s President [Wired/Mat Honan] Read the rest

Moxie Marlinspike and David Hulton's Divide and Conquer: Cracking MS-CHAPv2 with a 100% success rate presentation from Defcon is now a reality. If you want to crack a MS-CHAPv2 PPTP authentication handshake (like the one I use when I connect to IPREDator, the secure proxy I favor), they'll exhaust all of the DES keyspace for you for a mere $20, usually in less than a day.

Basically, MS-CHAPv2-based VPNs should now be considered insecure and not fit for purpose. Plus Moxie and David can brute force all of DES for $20. Yowza.

A Week Of Discounted Cracking

For this week (9/23/2012), we will be offering deeply discounted MS-CHAPv2 cracking jobs by reducing the price from $200 to $20. This means that any PPTP VPN connection or intercepted MS-CHAPv2 WPA Enterprise wireless credentials can be cracked and decrypted with a 100% success rate for only $20.

The one major caveat is that an influx of additional jobs might increase the pending queue depth and cause MS-CHAPv2 jobs to take slightly longer than ususal, but we'll see how it goes.

Cheaper MS-CHAPv2 Cracking

(via Hacker News) Read the rest

Dan Goodin's Ars piece on the state of password security is a must-read overview of the way that the password cracking landscape has changed in surprising ways. It's not just that computers have gotten faster -- it's the confluence of several factors, including: more sites that require passwords, which encourages password re-use; sites that use weak password hashing, unsalted hashing, or no hashing at all; and titanic dumps of real-world passwords that provide insight into how users choose their passwords. Put them all together and you get a situation like the LinkedIn dump, where 90 percent of the encrypted passwords were extracted in short order -- and where many of those passwords could be used to take over other user accounts, thanks to password re-use.

The RockYou dump was a watershed moment, but it turned out to be only the start of what's become a much larger cracking phenomenon. By putting 14 million of the most common passwords into the public domain, it allowed people attacking cryptographically protected password leaks to almost instantaneously crack the weakest passwords. That made it possible to devote more resources to cracking the stronger ones.

Within days of the Gawker breach, for instance, a large percentage of the password hashes had been converted to plaintext, a feat that gave crackers an even larger corpus of real-world passwords to inform future attacks. That collective body of passwords has only snowballed since then, and it grows ever larger with each passing breach. Just six days after the leak of 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes in June, more than 90 percent of them were cracked.