What can be done in 45 minutes. Intelligence agencies against hackers. How law enforcement experts crack passwords. How do they do it

Changes for the better do not always take a lot of time and effort. In just 45 minutes a day, these simple actions will help relieve stress, add vigor, tone and a portion of joy to us.

Olya Malysheva

· 20 minutes ·

Walk at a fast pace

Walking at a fast pace in the fresh air improves not only mood, but also heart function and is an excellent workout for the whole body. Although walking seems like a boring activity to many, it is one of the most versatile forms of physical activity that is suitable for absolutely everyone. And for which you only need legs. If you walk really fast - the way you usually walk when you are late for an important meeting - 20 minutes can be sweaty and energized after a long sitting in the office.

✭ You can combine walking at a fast pace with listening to audiobooks and exciting podcasts on headphones.

· 5 minutes ·

Eye Health Exercises

Work at the computer and love for the iPhone is not reflected in the best way on our vision. Even after three to five days without a computer while traveling, I notice that my eyesight improves and I can read signs on signs without any problems. But just a couple of days of hard work at the computer and vision becomes worse again. At one time, I took up my vision and did special exercises for the eyes every day, and in just two weeks my vision became much better.

✭ In addition to the classic exercises - looking up and down, right and left, circular movements, "drawing" letters and numbers with the eyes - there is an effective and very simple palming exercise. It helps with farsightedness, nearsightedness and relieves eye strain. I read about it in one of the books on yoga, and then found it in many sets of exercises for the eyes. Before palming, it is useful to do solarization - an exercise when you look at the sun or a burning candle. It improves blood circulation and helps restore vision.

· 3 minutes ·

Dry brush massage

This is a simple and accessible way to tone the skin, speed up the lymph flow and reduce the number of problem areas on the body. I put the brush in a prominent place in the bathroom so that before the shower I remember to dry massage and brush all over my body properly.

✭ Read more about dry brush massage and 9 more actions that will improve the functioning of our lymphatic system -.

· 3 minutes ·

Walking up the stairs

Up to the fifth floor, you can definitely do without an elevator, and if you go up the escalators in the subway, then you can save a couple of minutes on the contrary. If you have stairs in your office, climbing stairs can be combined with phone calls.

・ 7 minutes ・

Call your parents

Call your parents, grandparents or friends who will be sincerely glad to hear your voice. Just 5-7 minutes of talking with someone you hug less than you would like will make your day and the day of the person you call better. The ideal time for these calls is during your lunch break at work or on your way home from work. The head immediately switches from working affairs to another warm wave.

· 5 minutes ·

Stretching after work

If there is no time and energy for a full-fledged workout, light stretching always helps to recover after long work meetings or long sitting at the computer. A yoga mat, shorts or leggings and just five minutes is enough to do the splits, stretch well in all directions, stand on the bridge and do a shoulder stand.

· 2 minutes ·

Breathing exercises

In the middle of a busy day or already at home, two minutes of breathing exercises is one of the fastest and most effective ways to return to a calm, relaxed, balanced state. One of my favorite exercises is alternate nostril breathing. It is great for stress relief, soothing and refreshing.

✭ Close the right nostril with the thumb of the right hand and inhale through the left nostril. Then close the left nostril with the right ring finger and little finger, remove the thumb from the right nostril and exhale through the nose. Then, without pause, inhale through the right nostril. Close the right nostril with the right thumb and exhale through the left. This cycle can be repeated 15-20 times. Breathing should be slow, smooth and calm.

・・・

Where can I get these 45 minutes?

+ 20 minutes

Watch the feed on Instagram and Facebook no more than once a day.

+ 10 minutes

Do not waste time on rumors and gossip about the life of Hollywood stars or acquaintances of your acquaintances.

+ 15 minutes

Stop in time. If you bought a ticket for a movie, but after 40 minutes it became clear that the movie is complete nonsense, or the article that you started reading already at the third paragraph is no longer interesting, just stop. Grab a friend and head out of the cinema for a walk. Instead of a stupid article, take those extra 10 minutes for yourself or your loved ones. And that thick book, which is praised by everyone around, but which you are not interested in reading, it is better to give it to a colleague or put it to a neighbor.

Let me guess your thoughts after reading the headline: “I don’t even have time to even have a proper breakfast, what’s another 45 minutes?”.

Yes, familiar story. We jump up in horror from the fact that we overslept again, dress feverishly, have breakfast on the go, fly out of the house. Is it any wonder after that that the whole day then passes in a hurry, nerves and fuss? Meanwhile, you can organize your life in a completely different way. To do this, you should know and follow just a few simple rules, which are discussed in this article.

So, how should you spend your first morning hour so that your whole day passes calmly and fruitfully?

1. Wake up as early as possible

The ancients had such a belief that important things must be done early in the morning, because your fear is still asleep at this time. More than once I noticed that those things that seemed complicated and voluminous in the evening were carried out in the morning without any fear or delay. In addition, your opportunities at the beginning and at the end of the day are completely different things. Therefore, try to maximize the duration of your morning and get up at least an hour earlier. In this case, this is not about reducing the duration of sleep, but simply about a slight shift in your schedule.

2. Morning exercises (15 minutes)

Yes, for people who are seriously passionate about sports, such a duration of morning exercises may seem ridiculously short. But for an ordinary person who does nothing, even such a short warm-up can be a serious test. Especially if you practice software and use something like an advanced one, which can even give you a serious load in more than half the time.

3. Meditation (10 minutes)

After a good awakening workout, it's time to relax and tune in to a more relaxed way. Our brain, no less than our body, needs constant care, and is one of the best tools for this. Numerous have repeatedly proven that meditation changes our consciousness, reduces stress, improves brain activity and psycho-emotional state. Great bonus for spending, isn't it?

4. Diary entry (10 minutes)

Daily writing practices are becoming more and more popular today, and this is no coincidence. is one of the easiest and at the same time effective ways to start leading a meaningful life and increase your productivity. Fixing your feelings, achievements, new ideas helps to think them over better, articulate them more clearly and serves as the first step in putting them into practice. Definitely worth doing every morning instead of getting a fresh serving.

5. Planning (10 minutes)

Almost all business people understand the importance of planning their day. Clear definition of your goals, prioritization, clarification of a specific sequence of necessary actions will help you make every day of your life as productive as possible.

There are many different planning techniques, but the following is the best to use. Just select from the entire list of tasks the top three priorities, those that you need to complete without fail. You will start doing the tasks on this short list as soon as you arrive at the workplace and will not do anything else until you cross them off. This approach allows you to clearly define the most important goals and make every effort to achieve them.

As you can see, the recipe for the right morning is not at all complicated, it consists of only four ingredients, and its preparation will take you no more than 45 minutes. But then, throughout your day, you will eat the dish of a well-prepared, productive and successful day.

What is 45 minutes? For a student, this is a whole lesson, which sometimes lasts a very long time, but for a caring hostess, they fly by like 5 minutes, because during this time you need to do a lot. But no matter who you are and how busy you are, you can always find 45 minutes a day to make yourself better. To start changing for the better, it is not at all necessary to spend a huge amount of time on it. It only takes 45 minutes.

20 minutes - Walk at a fast pace

5 minutes - Exercise for eye health

Work at the computer and love for the iPhone is not reflected in the best way on our vision. In addition to the classic exercises - looking up and down, right and left, circular movements, "drawing" letters and numbers with the eyes - there is an effective and very simple palming exercise. It helps with farsightedness, nearsightedness and relieves eye strain. Before palming, it is useful to do solarization - an exercise when you look at the sun or a burning candle. It improves blood circulation and helps restore vision.

3 minutes - Dry brush massage

This is a simple and accessible way to tone the skin, speed up the lymph flow and reduce the number of problem areas on the body. Do it before the shower, massaging the dry body with a dry brush in the direction from the toes and hands to the heart. In problem areas, you can massage in circular motions - this massage perfectly improves blood circulation. The brush or washcloth should be of a pleasant stiffness. Do not press too hard - the main thing here is not the pressure force, but long movements in the direction of the lymph flow.

3 minutes - Walking up the stairs

7 minutes - Call your parents

5 minutes - Stretching after work

2 minutes - Breathing exercises

In the middle of a busy day or already at home, two minutes of breathing exercises is one of the fastest and most effective ways to return to a calm, relaxed, balanced state. One of the simplest and most effective exercises is alternate nostril breathing. It is great for stress relief, soothing and refreshing.

For alternate breathing, close the right nostril with the thumb of the right hand and inhale through the left nostril. Then close the left nostril with the right ring finger and little finger, remove the thumb from the right nostril and exhale through the nose. Then, without pause, inhale through the right nostril. Close the right nostril with the right thumb and exhale through the left. This cycle can be repeated 15-20 times. Breathing should be slow, smooth and calm.

Where can I get these 45 minutes?

+ 20 minutes

Watch the feed on Instagram and Facebook no more than once a day.

+ 10 minutes

Do not waste time on rumors and gossip about the life of Hollywood stars or acquaintances of your acquaintances.

+ 15 minutes

Stop in time. If you bought a ticket for a movie, but after 40 minutes it became clear that the movie is complete nonsense, or the article that you started reading already at the third paragraph is no longer interesting, just stop. Grab a friend and head out of the cinema for a walk. And that thick book, which is praised by everyone around, but which you are not interested in reading, it is better to give it to a colleague or put it to a neighbor.

Hackers, scammers, IT security workers, investigative agencies and intelligence agencies - all of them, under certain circumstances, can try to get to information protected with passwords. And if the tools used by hackers and intelligence agencies, on the whole, practically coincide, then the approach to the task differs radically. With the exception of isolated cases, which can be solved with enormous efforts, the expert works within severe limits both in terms of resources and the time that he can spend on cracking a password. What approaches are used by law enforcement agencies and how they differ from the work of hackers is the topic of today's material.

INFO

The method of searching and selecting passwords described in the article is not new, but is actually used by a number of special services when catching criminals.

With a kind word and a gun

Of course, first of all, representatives of the security agencies act by persuasion. “You will not leave here until you unlock the phone,” they tell the detainee, placing a document in front of him, where it is written in English and white that “the bearer of this has the right to inspect the contents of the detainee’s mobile devices.” That's just that the detainee is obliged to unlock his own phone, there is not a word in the document. That does not at all prevent security agencies from shamelessly exercising a right that they do not have.

Is it hard to believe this? In fact, not very much: the last such incident occurred just the other day. American citizen Sidd Bikkannavar, who works for NASA, was detained at the border while entering the country; it was with “a word and a gun” that he was persuaded to unlock his corporate smartphone.

Yes, you are not obliged to testify against yourself and give out your passwords. This principle is clearly illustrated by another case. Child pornography suspect has been in jail for 16 months for refusing to reveal passwords to encrypted drives. Presumption of innocence? No, we haven't heard.

However, such measures can not be applied always and not to everyone. You can't ban a petty swindler, a marriage swindler, or just a lover of pumping up music "in reserve" without clear evidence in prison, as well as a serious criminal with money and lawyers. Data has to be decrypted, and passwords have to be opened. And if in cases involving serious crimes and a threat to national security (terrorism), the hands of experts are untied, and there are practically no restrictions (financial and technical), then in the remaining 99.9% of cases, the expert is severely limited both by the available computing capabilities of the laboratory, and and time frames.

And how are things going with this in Russia? At the border, they are not forced to unlock the devices yet, but ... I will quote an expert who extracts information from the phones and computers of detainees: “The most effective way to find out the password is to call the investigator.”

The most effective way to find out the password is to call the investigator

What can be done in 45 minutes? And in two days?

Movies don't always lie. At one of the exhibitions, a man approached me, in whom I immediately recognized the head of the police station: big, bald and black. The information from the token confirmed the first impression. “I have two hundred of these ... iPhones in my station,” the visitor began on the move. - What can you do in 45 minutes? I had never come across such a question before. However, at that time (three years ago), devices without a fingerprint scanner were still popular, the Secure Enclave had just appeared, and, as a rule, there were no problems with installing a jailbreak. But the question stuck in my head. Really, what can be done in 45 minutes? Progress is being made, protection is becoming more complex, and the police are running out of time.

In the most minor cases, when the user's phone or computer is confiscated "just in case" (for example, detained for petty hooliganism), the investigation will have neither the time nor the strength, and often highly qualified workers, to crack the password. Unable to unlock your phone in 45 minutes? Let's turn to the evidence collected in a more traditional way. If you fight to the last for every encrypted device of every petty hooligan, there will not be enough resources for anything else.

In more serious cases, when the suspect's computer is also confiscated, the investigation may make more serious efforts. Again, the amount of resources that can be spent on hacking will depend on the country, on the severity of the crime, on the importance of digital evidence.

In conversations with police officers from different countries, the figure “two days” most often arose, while it was understood that the task fell on an existing cluster of a couple of dozen computers. Two days to crack passwords that protect, for example, BitLocker crypto-containers or documents in Office 2013 format - isn't it too little? It turns out not.

How do they do it

The police initially had tools for cracking passwords, but they learned how to fully use them not so long ago. For example, the police have always been interested in passwords that can be retrieved from a suspect's computer - but they first retrieved them manually, then using single utilities that could, for example, get only the password from ICQ or only the password to accounts in Outlook. But in the past few years, the police have come to use all-in-one tools that scan the device's hard drive and Registry and save all found passwords to a file.

In many cases, the police use the services of private crime laboratories - this applies to both routine and high-profile cases (thick reference to the San Bernardino trial). But the “private traders” are ready to use the most “hacker” methods: if the original data does not change, and there are no traces of interference, then the method by which the desired password was obtained does not matter - in court, an expert can refer to a trade secret and refuse to disclose technical details of the hack.

Real stories

Sometimes you need to act quickly: it's not about resources, it's about time. So, in 2007, the laboratory received a request: a 16-year-old teenager was missing. The parents turned to the (then) police, who came to the laboratory with the laptop of the missing person. The laptop is password protected. It was clear that there were no several months to search for passwords. Work went on in a chain. A disk image was taken, a password attack was launched in Windows in parallel. Disk search for passwords started. As a result, the email password was found in Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker. There was nothing else interesting on the computer. There was nothing in the mail that could help in the search, but through the mailbox we managed to reset the password to ICQ, and there we found correspondence with friends, from which it became clear in which city and to whom the teenager “disappeared”. It ended well.

However, stories don't always have happy endings. A few years ago, a French private investigator approached the laboratory. The police asked for his help: a famous athlete was missing. Flew to Monaco, further traces are lost. At the disposal of the investigation was the athlete's computer. After analyzing the contents of the disk, iTunes and the iCloud control panel were found on the computer. It became clear that the athlete has an iPhone. Tried to access iCloud: password unknown, but authentication token (pulled from iCloud Control Panel) worked. Alas, as is often the case, the cloud backup did not contain any hints of the location of the "lost", and the backup itself was created almost a month and a half ago. A careful analysis of the content made it possible to find the password from the mail - it was saved in the notes (the same “yellow sticker” with the password, so as not to forget). We went to the mail, found a hotel reservation. The police caught up ... Alas, the story ended badly: the athlete was found dead.

But back to our two days for hacking. What can be done during this time?

How (imp)useful are strong passwords

I'm sure you've heard advice on how to choose a "strong" password many times. Minimum length, letters and numbers, special characters... Does it really matter? And will a long password help protect your encrypted volumes and documents? Let's check!

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Option 1. Join the "site" community to read all the materials on the site

Membership in the community during the specified period will give you access to ALL Hacker materials, increase your personal cumulative discount and allow you to accumulate a professional Xakep Score rating!

Like at school...

The problem when violent activity is obvious, and the result is zero, is quite common. Not surprisingly, there are many different techniques for increasing productivity. It is clear that everything is individual here: someone needs a tight schedule, and someone works without any plan. The work.ua portal offers to try one of the most effective and affordable methods - the "45 by 15" technique.

This formula is not new and each of us is familiar firsthand. Have you forgotten school lessons of 45 minutes and 15-minute breaks?

As the name implies, the essence of the technique is to work hard for 45 minutes and rest for 15 minutes. The reason is simple: experts assure that a person is able to focus on one task for no more than 45 minutes. Hence the solution: break the working day into 45-minute segments, in each of which a person will be engaged in one task.

The main difficulty in applying this method is not to be distracted by extraneous things - phone calls, social networks, tea-coffee, and so on. This technique does not encroach on communication in the smoking room, but allocates it a strictly defined time - 15 minutes per hour.

By the way, the main rule of the 15-minute break is to completely move away from your workplace. That is, if you worked at the computer for 45 minutes, and decided to spend 15 minutes of the break on viewing mail, this can hardly be called a good rest. On the other hand, it is better to spend the allocated 15 minutes on social networks and mail than to be distracted all the time later.

But still, it is better to spend "legitimate rest" on any physical activity: walk along the corridor, run up the stairs, go outside. And this technique is especially suitable for those who work from home. You can’t even imagine how many household chores you can get done by organizing your work according to the 45/15 system!

Everything's under control!

It is easy to calculate that with such a regime, an 8-hour working day with a slight movement of the hand turns into a 6-hour one. Work.ua experts offer to face the truth and honestly admit that without this schedule, we are distracted much more - by telephone conversations, chatting with colleagues, correspondence in mail and chats, social networks and much more. Therefore, you do not take time away from your working day, but simply take control of it!

If everything is done correctly, these 6 hours will be much more productive than the previous 8. This system works and suits almost everyone, unless, of course, your profession implies continuity for a certain period of time.

For example, if you are an operating surgeon, you are unlikely to take a break from the operation for 15 minutes to unwind, states the portal. But if you're an office worker, worker, or mechanic, you can afford 45/15 technicians and get six full hours of full-time dedicated work as a reward.

Believe and check: it's more than what you are spending now!