[107354] in Cypherpunks
Password cracker.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (X1)
Tue Jan 12 05:13:59 1999
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 17:25:10 +0800
From: X1 <X1@krdl.org.sg>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: X1 <X1@krdl.org.sg>
Today when I was browsing the manual pages for pgp (pgp-intro) I came across
this interesting piece by Phil Zimmerman...
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There is a company called AccessData (87 East 600 South,
Orem, Utah 84058, phone 1-800-658-5199) that sells a pack-
age for $185 that cracks the built-in encryption schemes
used by WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, MS Excel, Symphony,
Quattro Pro, Paradox, MS Word, and PKZIP. It doesn't sim-
ply guess passwords-it does real cryptanalysis. Some peo-
ple buy it when they forget their password for their own
files. Law enforcement agencies buy it too, so they can
read files they seize. I talked to Eric Thompson, the
author, and he said his program only takes a split second
to crack them, but he put in some delay loops to slow it
down so it doesn't look so easy to the customer.
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