RE: Russian hacker nabbed by FBI now lost in federal prisonsystem

From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 08:45:57 MDT


Samantha Atkins wrote,
> What do you mean by "contravene"? He simply wrote papers and
> produced a program to back up his papers on how broken the
> protection schemes are.

Actually, it is not quite so simple. Dmitry Sklyarov works for a Russian
company called ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. of Moscow <http://ElcomSoft.com>. They
They sell commercial software that recovers passwords or breaks encryption
<http://ElcomSoft.com/prs.html>. Their software is purportedly intended for
people who have lost their passwords, but could be used by anybody to break
into for which they never had a password. They sell programs that can crack
into just about anything: Compressed files, Microsoft Office products, AOL,
ICQ, Quicken, QuickBooks, Lotus products, Adobe products, Borland/Corel
products, Symantec products, etc. They also sell password generators,
brute-force password crackers, and other tools that hackers often use to
break into other people's files. Their site is written in English and gives
all prices in U.S. dollars.

Their latest product is this program which breaks the encryption for Adobe
Systems Inc. PDF (Portable Document Format) files and e-books without having
the decryption key. This cracking program was not just written as an
exercise or as a demo. It was published as commercial software and is
offered for sale over the Internet <http://elcomsoft.com/apdfpr.html>. They
even have a free demo version of the program available for download that
will let people crack any Adobe e-book for 30 days.

--
Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com> <http://Newstaff.com>



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