Think passwords, people. Think long, complex passwords. Not because a breach dump's landed, but because the security-probing-oriented Kali Linux just got better at cracking passwords.
Kali is a Debian-based Linux that packs in numerous hacking and forensics tools. It's well-regarded among white hat hackers and investigators, who appreciate its inclusion of the tools of their trades.
The developers behind the distro this week gave it a polish, adding new images optimised for GPU-using instances in Azure and Amazon Web Services. The extra grunt the GPUs afford, Kali's backers say, will enhance the distribution's password-probing powers. There's also better supoprt for GPU cracking, hence our warning at the top of this story: anyone can use Kali and there's no way to guarantee black hats won't press it into service. And they can now do so on as many GPU-boosted cloud instances as they fancy paying for.
Could some users of Kali Linux technically be called "thugs?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @01:02AM
Are there any known benchmarks for using Kali for cracking passwords? I assume password hashes are being cracked rather than trying to guess a password by sending automated queries to a web form.
For example: how well does a salted bcrypt hash hold up to X number of Azure cloud GPU-using crack sessions?