Do you happen to be in possession of some rather nifty hacking knowledge, and also a £30 graphics card lying around the basement somewhere? If you answered “Yes” on both accounts, then good – chances are you are already equipped to be able to crack passwords in just a dozen seconds.
This was what business hosting firm UKFast revealed as part of Cyber Security Awareness Month, where they laid claim that hackers are able to figure out just what your password is in under 12 seconds with the kind of equipment mentioned, where tests involved an Nvidia Geforce GT220 graphics card as well as a Windows 7 machine.
The company’s security staff managed to crack an eight character password in four hours, while a seven character password took a mere five minutes with a six character password in a matter of 12 seconds. Imagine how much faster those passwords can be cracked when a far more powerful graphics cards is utilized, where even a GPU that costs 30 quid can process as much as 158 million possible passwords per second. Food for thought, no?
Filed in . Read more about GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Hacking and Password.