ID: IRCNE2012121699
Date: 2012-12-11
According to "cnet", Jeremi Gosney, founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, a company that handles password-cracking, has unveiled a computer cluster boasting 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards. The cluster's horsepower allows it to make 350 billion password guesses per second against the NT Lan Manager (NTLM) security protocol Microsoft has used in Windows Server since 2003.
Speaking to Ars in an e-mailed statement, Gosney said that his company's technology "can attack hashes approximately four times faster" than it previously could. Using a brute force method, the cluster is capable of guessing every single eight-character password containing letters, numbers, and symbols in 5.5 hours. If companies use LM, an earlier password option for Windows Server, the cluster can figure out a password in six minutes.
Password security continues to be a major challenge for consumers, corporations, and online services. A so-called "strong" password, which in most cases wouldn't be broken for days, if not weeks, is now easier and easier to crack with advanced tools. In other words, watch out and create as strong a password as possible.
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