Tag Archive for: Crackers

ProPublica reporters write about the misfit ransomware code crackers in “The Ransomeware Hunting Team”

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MONDAY on “The Source” —Earlier this month, Rackspace was hit by a ransomware group that took customers’ data. Potentially, this group has held onto this data in exchange for ransom, but the company has not said either way due to the investigation run by the FBI.

This unfortunately is not a new story, and as of 2022, almost half of all data breaches began with stolen credentials. Ransomware attacks target businesses, hospitals and nonprofits and hold the data from their customers or employees for ransom. Damages from ransomware as a whole are likely to exceed $30 billion dollars by 2023. Many believe the FBI may not have enough manpower to combat these ransomware attacks, and that is where an informal, largely self-taught coalition of code crackers comes in.

Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden write in their book about this group of people. “The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime” tells the story of these code crackers who work tirelessly to defend cyber storage.

Who are these code crackers? What is ransomware? What can individuals do to protect themselves from a ransomware attack? Why are civilians the primary defenders of ransomware instead of federal agencies?

Guests: 

“The Source” is a live call-in program airing Mondays through Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. Leave a message before the program at (210) 615-8982. During the live show, call833-877-8255, email [email protected] or tweet@TPRSource.

*This interview will be recorded on Monday, December 19.

Source…

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”

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Thanks to the XKCD comic, every password cracking word list in the world probably has correcthorsebatterystaple in it already.
Aurich Lawson

In March, readers followed along as Nate Anderson, Ars deputy editor and a self-admitted newbie to password cracking, downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes. Within a few hours, he deciphered almost half of them. The moral of the story: if a reporter with zero training in the ancient art of password cracking can achieve such results, imagine what more seasoned attackers can do.

Imagine no more. We asked three cracking experts to attack the same list Anderson targeted and recount the results in all their color and technical detail Iron Chef style. The results, to say the least, were eye opening because they show how quickly even long passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols can be discovered.

The list contained 16,449 passwords converted into hashes using the MD5 cryptographic hash function. Security-conscious websites never store passwords in plaintext. Instead, they work only with these so-called one-way hashes, which are incapable of being mathematically converted back into the letters, numbers, and symbols originally chosen by the user. In the event of a security breach that exposes the password data, an attacker still must painstakingly guess the plaintext for each hash—for instance, they must guess that “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99” and “7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c” are the MD5 hashes for “password” and “password1” respectively. (For more details on password hashing, see the earlier Ars feature “Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger.”)

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