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Showing posts from July, 2010

Defcon Crack Me if You Can Competition

I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a little time talking about the "Crack Me if you Can" competition at Defcon. It's really been amazing the amount of interest that this contest is drumming up. People are excited; it seems like everyone is refining their mangling rules, putting together new wordlists, and finishing up various password cracking tools. The impact that this is having on the password cracking community as a whole is hard to overstate. Needless to say, I'm a fan of that, and I have a ton of respect for Minga and the folks at KoreLogic for putting this together. I'll be participating, though I certainly don't plan on winning. What I'm really looking forward to though is the chance to meet with everyone else and learn what other people are doing. I'm hoping this turns into an event like the lockpicking village with the contest being almost besides the point. Of course I might be saying that because I'm going to get creamed as well...

Protecting Physical Documents

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The above picture is of my Subaru Baja. Sometime last night, someone broke my back window, and stole almost everything from my car, (they apparently did not like my music; btw Punk is not dead). Normally this would be a costly annoyance, but in this case I'm in the process of moving and finding a new job. While most of my stuff is sitting safely in a storage locker, I still had several boxes of various items stored in my back seat, including unfortunately my "to-go" bag. My to-go bag contained all of my important possessions that I planned on grabbing if my house was in the process of burning down. For example, it contained two thumb drives with backups of all of my work plus assorted other documents. I'm not worried about them though since I used TrueCrypt. Good luck cracking those, which BTW, is the reason I love TrueCrypt. What I am concerned about though is that my social security card, my passport, my birth certificate, my extra banking checks, and a whole lot of