14 DAY TRIAL // Although it might sound tricky, you can now recover a lost or forgotten Windows Vista logon password using a simple GeForce graphics card. The technology was designed by the Russian company Elcomsoft which also filed a patent currently in pending. You might think this is illegal but Elcomsoft is one of the Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, its solutions helping the customers to recover their lost passwords. The new version of ElcomSoft's software, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery 2.0, comes with support for Windows Vista and according to the parent company, it speeds up the entire password recovery process with up to 25 times.
The press release rolled out by Elcomsoft sustains using the graphics card's GPU (graphics processing unit) you can test approximately 55 trillion passwords in only three to five days which is pretty impressive if we think that a dual-core computer can check about 10,000,000 passwords per second, as the same company sustains.
"Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations," Elcomsoft stated.
The application can be bought for "only" $599, coming with a license for up to 20 clients. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is compatible with numerous applications and document formats including Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007 and older versions, Adobe Acrobat PDF with 128-bit and 40-bit encryption as well as Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista logon passwords.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery can be also downloaded from Softpedia using the following link.