14 DAY TRIAL // Nick Breese, security researcher based in New Zealand, has recently announced, at the Kiwicon hacker conference in Wellington, that Sony's PlayStation 3 can be used to crack passwords. Maybe this wouldn't be such great news, because sometimes these hackers seem to be able to crack passwords with no tools at all... The interesting thing regarding this fact is that the console can be used to crack passwords 100 times faster than the speed currently allowed by Intel hardware.
"Suddenly we have a massive increase in terms of . . . cryptography cracking", Nick Breese said. "Eight-character 'strong' passwords can be broken in a couple of days whereas before it would take weeks", he continued.
And while speed is the most important thing in the modern world, it seems that hacking needs it, too. That's because this type of "brute force" password cracking tries all the possible combinations of characters that might be a password and, eventually, finds the right one. 100 times faster means a lot, especially for Office documents, pdf or zip files. But, other types of passwords seem to be safe, in Breese's opinion, because apparently they are handled more securely - it would take one thousand PlayStations to break such a Linux password in about 3 days.
Also, online bank transactions are still safe: "It'll speed up the attacks but I can't see that it's broken," he says. This is because the persons who implemented these ciphers foresaw the rapid increase of CPU speed.
Of course, PlayStation 3 was not made for cracking passwords and nobody should even try to do that (with or without a PS3), but it's just the high-end technology it uses that makes it easier: its chips are optimized to rapidly render and perform calculations on 3D environments. The only thing left to do is to update the password security systems all over the world. Piece of cake!