Digital Forensics Tips

As I discussed in my previous post I recently started playing with GPU password cracking. After some modifications to my desktop system my machine was cracking passwords at a rate I was quite pleased with. After I put it through its paces on a few passwords I wondered how it would perform mining crypto-currency. I had zero experience in that area so I did some internet research to help me get started. One of the first themes I started seeing was that if your main motivation for mining crypto-currency was profit than you should likely run away. The consensus was that if you were interested in crypto, alternative currencies or other similar topics then this maybe a nice hobby for you but if your main interest in crypto-currency was money then you would be better off spending your money buying them directly rather than mining them. One of the next things I found out was that I was not going to be able to mine for Bitcoins using my new graphics card. When bitcoin mining was just starting p...

Last year I decided to buy a desktop computer to keep in my home office to run VMs and eventually set up to crack passwords. I didn’t want to spend too much but I was able to find a new dell XPS on eBay with an i7 processor, 16GB of ram and 2TB of hard drive space for $700. I had used john the ripper to crack password hashes quite a few times but hadn’t messed with using a GPU to crack passwords. A few weeks ago I decided to finally get the machine setup to use the GPU to crack passwords. I knew that ATI graphics cards tended to perform better than NVIDA cards but I had hoped that since the machine was a XPS the NVIDA graphics card in it would at least do a passable job. As I started doing some research I quickly realized that the NVIDA GX 620 currently in the machine wasn’t going to be able to crack passwords at a rate anywhere near that found in higher end cards so an upgrade was in order. I did a little bit of reading and the ATI 7950 ($230 with a $20 rebate at newegg.com) seemed li...