In March I posted the following article on CDW blog Enhancing Password Security Through Memorized Secrets Revisiting NIST recommendations provides some essential techniques for protecting your organization’s accounts

Back on May 18th, I attended the inaugural BsidesNH event. It was a fantastic one-day event. The day started pretty early for me driving down from Maine arriving at Southern NH University. I arrived to pick up the fantastic badge made out of an old 3.5″ disk. After grabbing some coffee and a snack I settled into the auditorium and for a day of great talks. There were a few that stood out to me from the day that I will talk about.

Intro During my OSCP studies, I realized I needed a more efficient system for cracking password hashes. The screaming CPU fans and high CPU usage became a problem. I first tried using hashcat and the GPU on my MacBook Pro in OS X. There are some bugs and problems with hashcat on OS X that would make it crash in the middle of cracking a hash. Also, I was not interested in investing a server with a bunch of GPUs, the high costs to do this would outweigh the amount of time I need the system.

On March 6th Cisco released 29 high and medium rated PSIRT notices for NX-OS based platforms. These platforms include the Cisco Nexus 3000 – 9000 series and Nexus adjacent platforms FX-OS and UCS Fabric Interconnect platforms. Not all advisories affect all platforms but all platforms are affected by at least one high rated vulnerability. The vulnerabilities range from command and code execution, privilege escalation, denial of service, and arbitrary file read vulnerabilities.