Can be done in 45 minutes. Intelligence agencies against hackers. How law enforcement experts crack passwords. Stretching after work


Five minutes - a lot or a little? It depends on how to use this period of time, and it is known to be the most expensive. Using every free minute for creativity, you thereby save yourself from idleness, and at the same time get a lot of pleasure from the knowledge that the item you received was made with your own hands. So what can you do in five minutes?
This section is dedicated to home craftsmen who, due to the nature of their activities, are very limited in time. Here you will find unique instructions for creating various useful and necessary things, made with your own hands in a short period of time.
This section also provides ideas for making a gift with your own hands from improvised materials that can be presented for any occasion. You will spend much less time than going to the supermarket to buy the original product.
You can devote any free minute to using your abilities and skills, and you can take ideas for creating masterpieces with your own hands from our website. Look around and you will see how much material is available near you! And with our instructions, it only takes five minutes to transform your unwanted items into unique DIY projects.

The development of technology has led to serious changes in the labor market - we are experiencing a real boom in remote employment, freelancing and what economists call “micro-business”, and ordinary people call “self-employment”.

Bloggers, journalists, consultants, coaches - a huge number of people around the world are changing the established rules of the game, choosing self-discipline and flexible employment instead of a corporate structure.

The popularity of various methods for increasing one’s own efficiency is a reflection of this trend: when income depends not on the number of hours spent at work, but on the result of labor, there is a great temptation to spend as little time as possible on achieving this result.

Citizens who have chosen relative freedom and find themselves floating freely learn to fight the inner procrastinator, study “” and enthusiastically try new techniques.

Such as “15 minutes windows”.

Magic 15 minutes

However, the authors of the 15 minutes window approach, May Wang and Katty Lee, founders of a company that improves productivity (personal and team), argue that in fact, you can get a lot done in 15 minutes. And if you wisely spend such short periods of time during the day, you can free up as many as several hours a week from the drudgery of work!

The approach is based on breaking down everything you have planned for the day into two groups:

  • projects
  • tasks

Projects are what you work on during the day, and each project consists of a list of tasks that need to be completed in order to achieve a goal (for example, to write an article, you first need to come up with a topic, collect material, develop an outline, write a draft, edit, proofread, send to editor, etc.).

But in addition to tasks that are directly related to your projects, there are tasks that have nothing to do with these projects, and we most often do not take them into account when planning our day, although their implementation eats up time (sort out mail and answer letters, make an appointment with the dentist , find the address of a store with costumes for a child, figure out what to cook in the evening, etc.) And for solving such problems, 15-minute periods of time are just perfect!

Useful breaks

Much has been written about the fact that when working on a project you must take breaks every 35-45 minutes; the author of the famous Pomodoro technique advises taking breaks for 5 minutes and simply getting up from the table and warming up.

However, adherents of the “useful 15 minutes” advise taking longer pauses, but spending them usefully - that is, switching attention from the project to non-project tasks (both resting the brain and useful time). In doing so, you can find solutions that will help you complete these tasks in a short time frame.


For example, if you are one of those who struggle with finding ideas on “what to cook,” then download applications that accumulate recipes from different sources in one feed so as not to waste time searching.

You can see what’s new on the sites that you usually read and whose pages you subscribe to in the “pages feed” tab on Facebook (you don’t need to waste time going to these sites - in this tab all updates are already collected in a digest).

If you subscribe to different mailing lists, then an app like Unroll.me can help you combine all your subscriptions into one email (no more spam and no more wasting time downloading, reading, and deleting emails).

Active to-do list

However, the basis of the principle of “effective 15 minutes” is still planning, which is so disliked by many. To spend time effectively, you need to know what to do, and it is better if you formulate a clear task for yourself in advance. Avoid vague formulations, coaches advise, set yourself a task very clearly:

  • not “look for a New Year’s costume,” but “find the addresses and opening hours of the nearest stores and costume rentals”;
  • not “deal with the bills”, but “log in and pay receipts for November online”;
  • not “think about what to do on New Year”, and “see ticket prices and hotels in three different directions”.
  • etc.

This way of setting a task will help you reduce the time it takes to complete it, since you will not need to rethink what exactly you need to do to solve the problem. As soon as you decide to take a break or have a break between meetings, you can look through the list of such tasks and decide what to spend your 15 minutes on.

You also need to rest properly

“Sometimes a 15-minute break between meetings or tasks is best spent relaxing,” advise coaches. Recovery is as much a part of the project as active immersion, and don't forget that you are not a robot.

However, if you decide to take a break for rest, try to make it a quality one - rest your eyes, look away from the screen, walk, go outside, and just close your eyes and listen to your favorite music for 15 minutes.

And on top of that, this activity tends to suck you in and take up time, going far beyond the scope of a “small break” - don’t fall into this trap, don’t throw away precious minutes.

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 dose of joy.

Olya Malysheva

· 20 minutes ·

Walk at a brisk pace

Walking at a brisk pace fresh air They improve not only your mood, but also your heart function and are an excellent workout for the whole body. Although walking seems boring to many, it is one of the most versatile forms physical activity, which suits absolutely everyone. And for which you only need legs. If you walk really quickly - the way you usually walk when you're late for an important meeting - in 20 minutes you can get sweaty and perk up after a long day of sitting in the office.

You can combine a brisk walk with listening to audio books and fascinating podcasts on headphones.

· 5 minutes ·

Exercises for eye health

Working on a computer and loving an iPhone does not affect our vision for the better. Even after three to five days without a computer while traveling, I notice that my vision improves and I can read 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 care of my vision and did special exercises for my eyes every day, and in just two weeks my vision became much better.

In addition to the classic exercises - looking up and down, left and right, circular movements, “drawing” letters and numbers with your eyes - there is an effective and very simple palming exercise. It helps with farsightedness, myopia 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 where 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 add skin tone, speed up lymph flow and reduce the number of problem areas on the body. I place the brush in a visible place in the bathroom so that before I shower, I remember to dry massage and thoroughly brush the entire body.

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

You can definitely get to the fifth floor without an elevator, and if you take the escalators in the metro, you can save a couple of minutes. If you have stairs in your office, climbing the stairs can be combined with telephone conversations.

・ 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 conversation with those whom you hug less often than you would like will make both your day and the day of the person you call better. Perfect time for such calls - a lunch break at work or on the way home from work. The head immediately switches from work matters to another warm wave.

· 5 minutes ·

Stretching after work

If you don’t have the time and energy for a full workout, light stretching always helps to recover after long work meetings or long periods of 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 a 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 effective ways return to a calm, relaxed, balanced state. One of my favorite exercises is alternate nostril breathing. It perfectly helps with stress, calms and refreshes.

Close your right nostril with your right thumb and inhale through your left nostril. Then close your left nostril with your right ring and little fingers, remove your thumb from your right nostril and exhale through your nose. Then, without pausing, inhale through the right nostril. Close your right nostril with your right thumb and exhale through your 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 your feed on Instagram and Facebook no more than once a day.

+ 10 minutes

Don't waste time on rumors and gossip about the lives of Hollywood stars or friends of your friends.

+ 15 minutes

Stop in time. If you bought a ticket to a movie, but after 40 minutes it became clear that the movie is complete nonsense, or the article you started reading already in the third paragraph has ceased to be interesting, just stop. Grab a friend and head out of the cinema for a walk. Instead of a stupid article, take these extra 10 minutes for yourself or your loved ones. And that thick book that everyone around you praises, but which you are not interested in reading, it’s better to give it to a colleague or give it to your neighbor.

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

Yes, a familiar story. We jump up in horror that we have overslept again, frantically get dressed, eat breakfast on the go, and fly out of the house. Is it any wonder after this 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 hour in the morning so that your whole day is calm and fruitful?

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 tasks that seemed complex and voluminous in the evening were completed in the morning without any fear or delay. Other than that, your capabilities 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, we are not talking about reducing the duration of sleep, but simply about a small shift in your schedule.

2. Morning exercises (15 minutes)

Yes, for people who are seriously interested in 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 become a serious test. Especially if you practice and use something like an advanced one, which is capable of giving you a serious load even in less than half the time.

3. Meditation (10 minutes)

After a good awakening workout, it's time to relax and get into a calmer mood. Our brain, no less than our body, needs constant care, and is one of the best tools for this. Numerous people have repeatedly proven that meditation changes our consciousness, reduces stress levels, improves brain activity and psycho-emotional state. A great bonus for money spent, isn't it?

4. Journal entry (10 minutes)

Daily writing practices are becoming increasingly 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. Recording your feelings, achievements, and new ideas helps you think them through better, formulate them more clearly, and serves as the first step in putting them into practice. This is definitely worth doing every morning instead of getting a fresh portion.

5. Planning (10 minutes)

Almost all business people understand the importance of planning their day. Clearly defining your goals, setting priorities, and figuring out the 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 best one to use is the following. Just select the three highest priorities from the entire list of tasks, those that you absolutely must complete. You will begin completing the tasks on this short list immediately after arriving at workplace and you won’t do anything else until you cross them out. 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 taste the dish of a well-prepared, productive and successful day.

Hackers, fraudsters, IT security workers, investigative agencies and intelligence agencies can all, under certain circumstances, try to get at information protected by passwords. And if the tools used by hackers and intelligence agencies are, in general, practically the same, then the approach to the task is radically different. With the exception of isolated cases, the solution of which can require enormous efforts, the expert works within strict limits both in terms of resources and the time he can spend on cracking a password. What approaches do law enforcement agencies use 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 it is actually used by a number of intelligence agencies when catching criminals.

With a kind word and a gun

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

Is this hard to believe? Actually, not very much: the last such incident happened just the other day. American citizen Sidd Bikkannavar, who works for NASA, was detained at the border upon entering the country; It was “with a word and a gun” that he was convinced to unlock the corporate smartphone.

Yes, you are not obliged to incriminate yourself and give away your passwords. This principle is clearly illustrated by the following case. A child pornography suspect has been jailed for 16 months for refusing to give up passwords to encrypted drives. Presumption of innocence? No, we haven't heard.

However, such measures cannot always be applied to everyone. You can’t throw a petty swindler, a marriage swindler or just someone who likes to pump up music in reserve without clear evidence, just like a serious criminal with money and lawyers. Data has to be decrypted and passwords have to be revealed. And if in cases involving serious crimes and threats national security(terrorism), the experts’ hands are free, and there are practically no restrictions (financial and technical), then in the remaining 99.9% of cases the expert is strictly limited by both the available computing capabilities of the laboratory and the time frame.

How are things going with this in Russia? At the border, devices are not yet forced to be unlocked, but... I’ll quote an expert who extracts information from the phones and computers of detainees: “The most effective way Finding out the password is a call to the investigator.”

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

What can you do in 45 minutes? And in two days?

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

In the most insignificant cases, when the user’s phone or computer is confiscated “just in case” (for example, they were detained for petty hooliganism), the investigation will not have the time, effort, or often highly qualified workers to reveal the password. Couldn't unlock your phone in 45 minutes? Let's turn to evidence collected in a more traditional way. If you fight to the last for every encrypted device of every petty hooligan, there won’t 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, and on the importance of digital evidence.

In conversations with the police different countries most often the figure was “two days,” implying that the task falls on an existing cluster of a couple of dozen computers. Isn't two days to crack passwords that protect, for example, BitLocker crypto containers or Office 2013 documents too little? It turns out not.

How do they do it

The police initially had tools for cracking passwords, but learned to fully use them only recently. For example, the police were always interested in passwords that could be extracted from a suspect’s computer, but they were extracted first manually, then using single utilities that could, for example, only obtain a password from ICQ or only a password to accounts in Outlook. But in the last few years, police have come to use all-in-one tools that scan HDD and Registry of the device and saves 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 (a thick hint at the trial in San Bernardino). But “private traders” are ready to use the most “hacker” methods: if the original data is not changed, and no traces of interference remain, then the method by which the required password was obtained does not matter - in court, an expert can refer to a trade secret and refuse to disclose technical details hacking

Real stories

Sometimes you need to act quickly: it’s not a question of resources, it’s a question of time. So, in 2007, the laboratory received a request: a 16-year-old teenager had disappeared. The parents contacted the (then) police, who came to the laboratory with the missing person’s laptop. The laptop is password protected. It was clear that there was no time to crack passwords for several months. Work began along the chain. The disk image was taken, and an attack on the Windows password was simultaneously launched. The search for passwords on the disk has 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 Mailbox I managed to reset my ICQ password, and there I found correspondence with friends, from which it became clear to which city and to whom the teenager “disappeared.” It ended well.

However, stories don't always have a good ending. Several years ago, a French private investigator contacted the laboratory. The police asked for his help: a famous athlete had disappeared. Flew to Monaco, then traces are lost. The investigation obtained 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 had an iPhone. We tried to access iCloud: the password is unknown, but the authentication token (pulled from the iCloud Control Panel) worked. Unfortunately, as often happens, the cloud backup did not contain any hints about the location of the “loss,” and the backup itself was created almost a month and a half ago. A careful analysis of the contents allowed us to discover the email password - it was saved in the notes (the same “yellow sticker” with the password, so as not to forget). We went to the mail and found a hotel reservation. The police caught up... Alas, the story ended badly: the athlete was found dead.

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

How (useless) are strong passwords?

I have no doubt that you have heard many times advice on how to choose a “strong” password. Minimum length, letters and numbers, special characters... Is it really that important? And will a long password help protect your encrypted volumes and documents? Let's check!

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