Monday, July 16th 2012
NVIDIA Forums Hack: Passwords Not Salted
A group of hackers that claimed responsibility for hacking NVIDIA forums (forums.nvidia.com), which goes by the name "Team Apollo," posted the first piece of its exploits on Pastebin (find it here). The user data dump contains details of every fifth user of the forums. From what we can tell looking at the pasted data (which is now very much in the public domain), the passwords found in the user tables are not salted. NVIDIA was less than honest about that part.
The passwords are stored as raw MD5 hashes, which can be fairly-easily decrypted (when compared to hashes with salt values). To make matters worse, certain MD5 decryption websites have large databases of pre-decrypted MD5 phrases, potentially making decryption these hashes easy. Or you could just use a CUDA-accelerated MD5 decryption tool, which munches through unsalted MD5 hash values at the speed of a small supercomputer. If you have an NVIDIA Forums account, and your passwords on other websites (forums, email accounts, banks) even remotely resemble that of your NVIDIA forums account, it is strongly recommended that you change your passwords on each of those other websites.
The passwords are stored as raw MD5 hashes, which can be fairly-easily decrypted (when compared to hashes with salt values). To make matters worse, certain MD5 decryption websites have large databases of pre-decrypted MD5 phrases, potentially making decryption these hashes easy. Or you could just use a CUDA-accelerated MD5 decryption tool, which munches through unsalted MD5 hash values at the speed of a small supercomputer. If you have an NVIDIA Forums account, and your passwords on other websites (forums, email accounts, banks) even remotely resemble that of your NVIDIA forums account, it is strongly recommended that you change your passwords on each of those other websites.
55 Comments on NVIDIA Forums Hack: Passwords Not Salted
:laugh::roll:
search for that text in the posted data and you will find it three times
Gives you an idea what people regularly use as passwords.
I once "fixed" a computer for someone who acted as if they pioneered software engineering yet couldn't figure out why he was getting BSOD's. I sat down on his OEM rig and discovered 32 viruses and his not so well hid porn stash. He said the viruses downloaded the porn. His wife kept asking me if that was true and I just said "Its possible" :laugh:
After she left I said to him "Dude come on. You hid your porn on the desktop in a folder called "(His name) Work Files" This virus knew your first name?" :laugh:
If you want a totally random password then I'd suggest using PCTools Secure Password Generator.
www.pctools.com/guides/password/
Is anyone elses Techpowerup password techpowerup.....