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General Information
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August 29, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 35
Page(s) 27 in print issue
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ElcomSoft Recovers Lost Passwords, Audits Security
Regain Access To Protected Data, Applications, Systems
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One indication of the challenges of heightened computer security, according to ElcomSoft, is that nearly half of support calls to IT are related to lost or forgotten passwords, with each incident costing the company an average of $30 to $50 to resolve.
Established in 1990, ElcomSoft (+7 495 974 1162; www.elcomsoft.com) specializes in producing Windows productivity and utility applications for businesses and individuals for password recovery, forensics and investigation, password audit, and electronic discovery.
Today, the Moscow, Russia,-based company has customers throughout the United States and around the world, including Fortune 500 corporations such as Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Bank of America, Equifax, Boeing, and AT&T; forensic agencies; military and governmental institutions, such as the FBI, CIA, and the U.S. Army, Navy, and Department of Defense; and thousands of end users.
What are the biggest IT-related issues facing today’s small to midsized enterprise?
“With growing government and industry regulations regarding computer and data, coupled with near-daily headlines of lost and stolen data and unauthorized computer access, IT is becoming increasingly aware of the need to ensure security, including through password-based access and encryption for files, applications, and systems,” says company CEO Vladimir Katalov.
But, notes Katalov, “Most small to midsized companies today do not have the IT time or facilities to implement appropriate security policies to prevent data leakage or hacker attacks. And even where password protection is in place for files and systems, these companies often don’t adequately train users on proper password policies or conduct password audits.” This, says Katalov, “can result in password-locked documents, tables, archives, applications, and systems that nobody knows the password for.”
Reasons for unavailable passwords can be that the user can’t remember, lost, or even maliciously changed them, or the user is unavailable when access is needed due to vacation, illness, termination, or even an untimely death.
What should Processor readers know about your company’s products?
“ElcomSoft’s software makes it easier for organizations to recover lost passwords from Windows and Unix operating systems, Microsoft Office products, Adobe PDF files, ZIP and RAR archives, and other applications without needing to own and use expensive hardware,” says Katalov. “Our products can recover passwords for [more than] 100 different applications. Our bootable System Recovery CD or flash drive can unlock Windows accounts within minutes; reset account passwords, including Domain Admin; unlock and enable user and administrative accounts; and assign administrative privileges to any user account.”
ElcomSoft password recovery products include ElcomSoft’s Password Recovery, ElcomSoft Password Recovery Bundle, and ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery. In addition to password recovery tools, ElcomSoft also offers a tool that performs security policy audits, Proactive Password Auditor, and a program to recover EFS-encrypted data.
ElcomSoft’s mission is to make people understand that password recovery is not the same as password cracking, Katalov stresses. “We see password recovery as a vital part of complex security policy that any organization might have to successfully protect its data in the future.”
What makes your company unique?
ElcomSoft was one of the first Russian companies to succeed in the shareware business, notes Katalov. Today, he says, “we have unique technologies that make our products faster and more powerful than the competition. Our patent-pending GPU acceleration can do password recovery up to 50 times faster than traditional CPU-only methods, when the system includes a compatible Nvidia graphics card, by offloading some of the computational-heavy processing. And our unique Thunder Tables technology for password recovery, which we have filed for a U.S. patent on, uses precomputed tables to speed up the recovery of 40-bit keys.”
by Daniel P. Dern
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