password-cracking by journalists... (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:15:21 -0500
From: Steve Bellovin <smb at research.att.com>
To: cryptography at wasabisystems.com
Subject: password-cracking by journalists...

A couple of months ago, a Wall Street Journal reporter bought two
abandoned al Qaeda computers from a looter in Kabul.  Some of the
files on those machines were encrypted.  But they're dealing with
that problem:

	The unsigned report, protected by a complex password, was
	created on Aug. 19, according to the Kabul computer's
	internal record. The Wall Street Journal commissioned an
	array of high-speed computers programmed to crack passwords.
	They took five days to access the file.

Does anyone have any technical details on this?  (I assume that it's
a standard password-guessing approach, but it it would be nice to know
for certain.  If nothing else, are Arabic passwords easier or harder
to guess than, say, English ones?)



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