Press Room

Press releases

All press releases, white papers and some other documents represented in Portable Document Format (PDF). Download Adobe Reader for reading.

1. 14/10/2009. ElcomSoft Updates Distributed Password Recovery with Dictionary Attacks. File size: 703 K
2. 12/10/2009. ElcomSoft Surveys Corporate Users, Discovers Major Security Hole. File size: 129 K
3. 23/04/2009. ElcomSoft Makes PGP® Disk Password Recovery Faster and More Affordable. File size: 697 K
4. 16/04/2009. Near-Instant Recovery of Password-Protected Excel Spreadsheets. File size: 302 K
5. 01/04/2009. ElcomSoft to Recover Passwords with a Tambourine. File size: 181 K
6. 26/02/2009. ElcomSoft Offers a Special Discount for Government Institutions. File size: 147 K
7. 15/01/2009. ElcomSoft Employs ATI and NVIDIA for Its Password Cracking Business. File size: 175 K
8. 26/11/2008. ElcomSoft Claims Adobe Acrobat 9 Is a Hundred Times Less Secure. File size: 593 K
9. 16/10/2008. ElcomSoft Utilizes NVIDIA Tesla Supercomputers for Password Recovery. File size: 905 K
10. 09/10/2008. ElcomSoft Breaks Wi-Fi Encryption Faster with GPU Acceleration. File size: 661 K
11. 02/10/2008. Creating a New Reality: Cracking One Billion Passwords per Second. File size: 702 K
12. 16/09/2008. 40-bit Encryption Is Dead. File size: 267 K
13. 16/04/2008. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery adds Multiprocessor/Multicore Support. Password recovery speed is enhanced by a factor of up to sixteen. File size: 646 K
14. 27/03/2008. Elcomsoft System Recovery supports Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1. Easily Access Your Locked-Up Windows Computer. File size: 999 K
15. 27/02/2008. Advanced EFS Data Recovery Breaks Vista and Windows Server 2008 Encryption. File size: 215 K

White papers

1. Open Sesame!. The easy way to restore access passwords to files, applications and databases. File size: 2220 K
2. An effective approach to restoring system access in Windows. File size: 1999 K
3. Proactive is better than reactive. Testing password safety – a key to securing a corporate network. File size: 1896 K
4. Advantages and disadvantages of EFS and effective recovery of encrypted data. File size: 2063 K
5. Unlocking PDF. Guaranteed password recovery for Adobe Acrobat. File size: 2173 K
6. Size does matter. Advantages of distributed password recovery. File size: 1864 K
7. ElcomSoft Solutions in the corporate information security environment. File size: 2089 K

Articles about us

1. Cracking keys on the cheap in the cloud. The H Security 3/11/2009

   «They ran a distributed brute force attack on the file using Amazon's EC2 web service. The software (EDPR) for the attack came from Russian company ElcomSoft. On a dual Core PC running Windows 7, determining the password by trial and error would have taken 2,100 days. 10 virtual computers running EDPR simultaneously, reduced this to just 122 days. One hour of EC2 processing time in this case costs $0.30 per instance, meaning that it cost just under $9,000 to crack the key. Since, according to Electric Alchemy, EDPR scales in a more or less linear fashion, using 100 instances, the same result could be achieved for the same price in just 12 days.» Read more

2. Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR. Electric Alchemy 30/10/2009

   «When faced with the task of brute forcing PGP passphrases, we immediately thought of Elcomsoft. We had witnessed the drama at Infosec 2009 in London when PGP had banners removed from Elcomsoft's booth, and that made a lasting impression. We downloaded the trial version of Elcomsoft's Distributed Password Recovery software, but found that unfortunately it was not able to properly parse the old PGP ZIP files.» Read more

3. Balancing Windows security with reasonable password policies. SearchWindowsServer.com 07/10/2009

   «At the end of the day, the password decryption capabilities of tools such as Ophcrack and Elcomsoft's Proactive System Password Recovery can render Windows passwords useless. But that's not the point. One still shouldn't be able to use a good vulnerability scanner such as QualysGuard or Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner to crack Windows passwords. If a security consultant or auditor can do it, then a malicious insider or external attacker can do it as well. It's just a matter of time.» Read more

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Books about our software and related topics

Proactive Password Auditor

• Practical Intrusion Analysis: Prevention and Detection for the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Trost
• IT Auditing: Using Controls to Protect Information Assets by Chris Davis, Mike Schiller, Kevin Wheeler
• FISMA Certification & Accreditation Handbook by L. Taylor

MS Office password

• Computer Network Security: Theory and Practice by Jie Wang

Windows login passwords, AEFSDR

• A+ Certification Study Guide, Sixth Edition by Jane Holcombe, Charles Holcombe

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery

• Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions, Sixth Edition by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, George Kurtz

Advanced EFS Data Recovery, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, PGP

• Investigating Digital Crime by Robin P. Bryant

Intuit backdoor

• Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Ross J. Anderson

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, GPU

• Network Know-How: An Essential Guide for the Accidental Admin by John Ross
• Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions, Sixth Edition by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, George Kurtz

Advanced EFS Data Recovery

• Windows Server 2008 PKI and Certificate Security by Brian Komar

Case studies

1. Don’t let EFS trick you: Tips on recovering EFS-encrypted data when it gets lost. File size: 81 K

Presentations

22/10/2008	Further steps in password recovery
	Nowadays graphic cards are becoming increasingly fast and it is very tempting to aim this power at challenging computation task. In this presentation I will show how GPUs can be applied to significantly accelerate password recovery (which usually translates to doing some cryptography as fast as possible). I will also show how to build PC capable of recovering Windows passwords hashes at a rate of 1.5 billion passwords per second for less than $2000.
18/10/2008	Passwort cracking without Russian mafia
	When an employee gets fired, often finds the employer a lot of password-protected documents on his or her computer. The files are here without any possibility of getting access to them, right? Wrong. The Russian company ElcomSoft claims to recover the passwords and, thus, save critically important documents. Vladimir Katalov, CEO of ElcomSoft, told PC Professionell about password recovery methods based on the complex cryptographic algorithms. Then the camera-shy CEO yielded the floor to his marketing expert Katerina Korolkova. Besides explaining other issues, she answered the editor’s tricky question on whether ElcomSoft’s tech guys come from the Russian mafia.
24/04/2008	Faster Password Recovery with modern GPUs
	This talk is about using graphic processors for accelerating cryptographic algorithms and, thus, password recovery. Some information on GPU architecture will be given along with general optimization strategies. Step by step, you'll see how to build GPU-enabled password cracker from ground up and turn your GeForce into password crunching machine :-)
24/10/2007	Breakthrough in Password Recovery: Thunder Tables® and GPUs
	This talk focuses on the latest technologies implemented for password recovery. The first one is the use of computational power of NVIDIA graphic cards that increases the recovery speed dramatically on generally available hardware. The other celebrates an important upgrade of Rainbow tables. Newly designed hash tables (Thunder Tables®) guaranty almost instant recovery with 100% certainty.

Wallpapers

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