Cracking 25 Billion Passwords per Second

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Joe Pizzini writes that a Renderstream customer who works as a security expert at a Fortune 500 firm was able to crack 25 billion passwords in a single second using the company’s GPU solutions.

“As part of our security program, it’s continuously evolving to include the latest attack vectors and ensure that our organization is protected against attack. As part of that is called “penetration testing” which is a field where you attempt to hack the company in a manner that tests how effective the security controls in place are at handling and detecting a potential exposure. We leverage the large capacity of the graphics processors to crack passwords in a manner that greatly expedites how fast you can obtain them using graphics processors.”

Pizzini goes on to describe how the IT industry is wrangling with password complexity requirements to cope with the advancements in password cracking. To remain secure, the adoption of multiple two factor solutions using things like biometrics will be required because “secure” passwords with 50 plus characters are simply impractical.