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Showing posts from 2016

Evaluating the Value of the (@)Purge Rule

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“Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.”    ― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand Background and Problem Statement: I was recently asked the following question: "Is there any value in supporting the character purge rule in Hashcat?"  The purge rule '@x' will remove all characters of a specific type from a password guess. So for example the rule '@s' would turn 'password' into 'paword'. The full thread can be found on the Hashcat forum  here.  The reason behind this inquiry was that while the old version of Hashcat implemented the character purge rule, GPU versions of Hashcat and Hashcat 3.0 dropped support for it. Since then, At0m added support for the rule back in the newest build of Hashcat which makes this question much less pressing. That being said, similar questions pop up all the time and I felt it was worth looking into if

Cracking the MySpace List - First Impressions

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Alt Title: An Embarrassment of Riches Backstory: Sometime around 2008, a hacker or disgruntled employee managed to break into MySpace and steal all the usernames, e-mails, and passwords from the social networking site. This included information covering more than 360 million accounts. Who knows what else they stole or did, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing only on the account info. For excellent coverage of why the dataset appears to be from 2008 let me refer you to the always superb Troy Hunt's blog post on the subject . Side note, most of my information about this leak also comes from Troy's coverage. This dataset has been floating around the underground crime markets since then, but didn't gain widespread notoriety until May 2016 when an advertisement offering it for sale was posted to the "Real Deal" dark market website. Then on July 1st, 2016, another researcher managed to obtain a copy and then posted a public torrent of then entir

Getting Started With Quantum Computing

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“More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we're not smart enough.”  ― Scott Aaronson IBM is currently offering free time on one of their quantum computers for interested researchers. Yup, you can program a real life quantum computer right now! In fact, I highly recommend signing up which you can do here . Go ahead and check it out. It took me about 24 hours to get my account approved so you can come back here afterwards to finish reading this post. What got me interested in this opportunity was that while I have tried to keep up on the field of quantum computing, it basically is magic to me.  I've been building up some general rules in my head about quantum systems, but any sort of question about them that did more than scratch the surface left me shrugging my shoulders. Also it was hard to separate fact from fiction. Quantum Laws (in Matt's head): Quantum is a system like everything else.  A quantum state is a configuration of the system.