Many Passwords Stored Unencrypted

By Lashan Clarke

One of the highlights at the CanSecWest conference in the past week involved showing how software tools can be programmed to obtain user passwords.

This session was headed by Tom Liston and Sherri Davidoff, who are employed at Intelguardians, the software security firm.

Liston and Davidoff highlighted how using Windows and Linux software does not guarantee that your password is encrypted.

Many of the applications actually were found to store the password unencrypted, and it was shown that it was possible to use a thumb drive to obtain these passwords from RAM.