I’ve been working on a neat project the last few weeks. A friend of mine needed me to crack into a Windows install. This is all authorized and legit. I’d rather not get into the details of why though. I’ll just say it’s legal as it is his computer now for reasons.
A few years back I got into crypto coin mining, and I assembled a fairly low end mining rig using some Nvidia 750TIs. While the coin mining was pretty much a bust (I’ll save that story for another post), I did learn quite a bit about cyptology and such. Crypto coin mining is pretty much a big encryption puzzle. It was not difficult to re-task the miner into cracking passwords using a really nice program called hashcat.
I don’t have the time to write up the full report on what I’m learning, but it’s pretty fascinating stuff. The numbers being used are so large it will boggle your mind. I don’t even know the names of these large numbers!
So in the next few weeks, I’ll be assembling some facts about password complexity vs time to crack. So far my setup hasn’t broken anything, I do hope the story will end with a successful crack for the original mission.