Firefox 3 History Recovery helps in all other cases. It is a command line tool that can analyse uncompressed disk images to discover traces of the four SQLite tables moz_places, moz_historyvisits, moz_formhistory and moz_downloads. What the recovery tool can return are therefor the visited urls, the form history and the downloads.

Firefox 3 History Recovery is a forensic tool and therefor not designed with usability in mind. It can only be executed from the command line and the biggest problem that users face is that they need to create a disk image for this process. The developer mentioned a few tools that can be used to create those disk images: winhex, ftk imager and dcfldd.

The program itself is easy to use in comparison. All the user needs to do is to enter the command

ff3hr -i


to start the recovery process. The command line tool will create four new text documents in its directory that will contain the information found on the disk image. Firefox 3 History Recovery is an Open Source software program that is available at the Sourceforge website.

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The developer provides some plain numbers to show the effectiveness of using the GPU to recover a rar password with four characters:

• ~168 passwords per second on single core of Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz (crark’s result)
• ~325 passwords per second on 8600 GT
• ~3120 passwords per second on ATI HD4850
• ~2075 passwords per second on GTX260/192SP

The performance of the listed ATI card is almost 20 times that of a password recovery where only the cpu is used. The password recovery software is a command line utility and the developer is offering extensive information on the possible parameters that can be used to recover the password. The suggested length of the password should not exceed six characters although it is theoretically possible to start a password recovery for a password with up to 17 chars.

The basic command for the password recovery is:

igrargpu.exe [switch:param] filename.rar

The command

igrargpu.exe /a:b /c:s /min:1 /max:4 archive.rar

will for example check all four letter combinations of lower case Latin characters. Known characters of the password can be added to the command to speed up the recovery attempt.It is advised to check the readme for a detailed overview of all possible parameters. The password recovery program can also use a dictionary based attack with rules. RAR GPU Password recovery should work on most versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. The portable software is available for download at the developer’s website.

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The laptop theft recovery software Prey tries to increase the chances by collecting and sending a bunch of information over the Internet. It obviously does not help if the thief is clever enough to format the laptop before using it. If the thief boots the operating system and connects the laptop to the Internet then Prey will be able to submit the data.

Prey works by checking an url regularly for existence. If the url exists it will send out the collected data to a specified email account. The date includes:

This includes the general status of the computer, a list of running programs and active connections, fully-detailed network and wifi information, a screenshot of the running desktop and — in case your laptop has an integrated webcam — a picture of the thief

About the url that has to be created. The laptop theft recovery program has been designed that way to avoid data being send out continuously by the software. Users can for example sign up at a free web hosting service such as Blogger to create the url that the software program checks (for Ghacks it could for example be http://www.ghacks.net/stolen/).

The user needs to specify login data to a s SMTP server so that the data can be transferred. The laptop theft recovery software Prey is available for the Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating system. The Linux and Mac version are currently more advanced and come with a bi-lingual interface, automatic connection to the first open Wi-Fi network.

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The password recovery software supports both dictionary and brute force methods. The first relies on known words while the second method will test all possible character combinations. A dictionary attack can only be successful if the creator has chosen a dictionary word as the password. Using dictionaries as the recovery method can be much faster than the brute force approach.

The recovery software is easy to use. All that needs to be done is to load a password protected zip file into the program’s interface. A dictionary has to be loaded if the dictionary recovery method is selected. The brute force recovery method requires a few additional parameters. The range of characters has to be selected as well as the minimum and maximum length of the password.

The password recovery software did test 13503531 passwords in 137 seconds on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 system with 4 Gigabytes of computer memory and a Intel Core Duo processor with 3.0 GHz. It would still take hundreds of years to test all possible password combinations of a size between 3 and 12 characters (alphanumerical).

Brute forcing makes therefor only sense if the password length is not greater than 6 unknown chars. It should also be noted that the recovery time is the maximum time needed. If the password length is lower it will not take that long.

The developer’s website contains dictionaries that can be used in the password recovery software.

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