[ISN] Moxie Marlinspike's CloudCracker Aims For Speedier, Cheaper Password Cracking

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/14/moxie-marlinspikes-cloudcracker-aims-for-speedier-cheaper-password-cracking/

By Andy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
2/14/2012

A little over two years ago, well-known hacker and security researcher 
Moxie Marlinspike launched an online service that, for a fee of $17, 
could crack most wifi networks’ password in less than hour. Apparently 
that wasn’t fast enough.

On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched CloudCracker, an upgrade to the 
Web-based penetration testing service he formerly called WPACracker, 
with a major upgrade to the speed and versatility of that 
password-breaking service. For $17, CloudCracker can now break into a 
standard WPA-PSK wireless networks by burning through dictionaries of 
possible passwords at about twice the speed of WPACracker, exhausting 
600 million words in one hour instead of 260 million in the previous 
version .

For networks with especially obscure passwords, the tool can now use 
dictionaries as big as 4.8 billion words in the same amount of time for 
the price of $136. And instead of only focusing on cracking wifi 
networks, the tool can now break passwords protected by Microsoft‘s 
Windows LAN Manager and NT LAN Manager hashing systems too, for a price 
of fifty cents for every password. Marlinspike says he hopes to add more 
password formats in the future.

“We’re really trying to push the envelope in terms of password 
cracking,” says Marlinspike, a well known security researcher who now 
works for Twitter but built CloudCracker as an independent project. 
“Basically you get more dictionaries for your dollar, about twice the 
cracking power for the same price.”

[...]


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