I blogged the other day about using secure passwords and staying away from the obvious ’123456′.
I now fear that blog was all in vain.
Rather than use the power of a CPU to try and break a password, some researcher has now discovered that using the GPU (i.e. the processor in your graphics card) is much, much faster. And it does not need to be a top end card either. The power of the GPU was demonstrated using a Radeon HD 5770.
And the results? A random 5 character password would be broken by a CPU in about 24 seconds. On the GPU it was less than 1 second. The GPU works about 300 times faster than the CPU. And choosing a password made up of random characters, numbers and special characters is not much defence. A random 7 character password containing all of the above would take a CPU 75 days to break (there is a huge number of possible combinations) – but the GPU would manage it in about 7 hours.
Frightening? Indeed, but whether or not such attacks are possible it still pays to make things as hard as you can for a potential cracker.
Now, where did I leave that post-it?
