Russians use Geforce to crack Vista passwords

PESKY RUSSIANS have come up with a novel way of using Nvidia's graphics hardware - cracking passwords.

INQ readers will long be familiar with the concept of the GPGPU, and the green team's latest CUDA development kit. Folks batting for the greens have been lauding the processing power of the 8800 when it comes to complex oil, gas and financial simulations.

But those crazy Ruskis have come up with a use that is rather more nefarious. Elcomsoft, based in Moscow, has created a password cracking technique that uses the same parallel processing concepts to speed up dictionary and brute force attacks on things like Windows Vista password logins. The firm says that the 8800 is up to 25 times faster than a CPU, normally used for such tasks.

From what we understand, the firm hasn't tried SLI yet. Large financial institutions may wish to cower around about now.

The folks at New Scientist have the low-down, along with a few choice quotes from one of the INQ's favourite SpiNvidians, Andrew 'Bath time' Humber.

Other tasks the INQ would suggest researchers put their minds, and graphics cards, to include extrapolating the amount of beer consumed by the Mageek during his journalistic career, as well simulating the effect on the internet of the cumulative data storage requirements of the amount of press releases the company puts out. That one should take a while. µ