Eight RTX 4090s Can Break Passwords in Under an Hour

[sl8]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/eight-rtx-4090s-can-break-passwords-in-under-an-hour

Eight RTX 4090s Can Break Passwords in Under an Hour

By Francisco Pires
published about 18 hours ago

Even faster if it's still "password"

Security researcher Sam Croley took to Twitter to share just how incredible Nvidia's new RTX 4090 really is... at cracking passwords. It turns out it's twice as fast as the previous leader, the RTX 3090, at breaking one of your passwords — even when faced off against Microsoft's New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication protocol and the Bcrypt password-hacking function.

Essentially, this means that any wealthy gamer sporting the RTX 4090 can crack an average password in a matter of days — and that's if you follow good password-setting practices (and most of us definitely don't).

The benchmark, HashCat V.6.2.6., is a renowned password-cracking tool that lays best in the hands of system administrators and cybersecurity professionals (of which Croley was a core programmer, by the way). It allows researchers to test or guess user passwords in the few situations that might require it.

[...]

Relax — not every RTX 4090 owner will turn their top-tier graphics card towards a password-cracking pastime. Additionally, the password-cracking ease of tools such as HashCat are usually deployed against offline assets, not online ones. This means that the chances of your PC being the target of a deranged RTX 4090-owner cracking passwords at will are slim — so slim they're almost nonexistent.

[...]

[JohnSJ]

1. Let's see them break my double authentication passwords with my cell phone verification

[FBaggins]

7. Exactly right

Almost any system worth securing will be protected by more than just a password that you can guess millions of combinations without getting locked out. Unless we're talking about nuclear codes of course

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Graphics cards for hacking passwords?

I really don't understand computing

[FBaggins]

6. They're much faster than CPUs these days

Particularly for multi-threaded applications like this.

Most (all?) of the crypto-mining rigs are really just support systems (cooling, power, etc.) for a bunch of GPUs

[Pobeka]

8. Graphics cards (chips) can contain 100's of specialized, "mini-cpu's"

On the standard motherboard if you will, is a chip that may contain anywhere from 1 to 8 individual CPU's that can run in parallel.

As graphics became for sophsticated, the invention of the GPU (graphics processing unit) came along, very small, specialized and limited processors that could just handle the math & operations required to paint pixels on screens. Graphics chip manufacturors were able to put many, many GPU's on a single chip, so the "painting" of the image on a screen would happen with processors running in parallel, and the time to create a single screen got extremely fast.

Software programmers can utilized these graphics cards to not just create pixels to create images, but process any data they want.

My graphics chip has 768 individual processing units, and it is just a mid-range chip.

[True Dough]

3. Almost all of my passwords are

sl8.

Thanks for informing us of this threat. I will now change them! I'm thinking sl9 should be a safe alternative.

[sl8]

4. LOL. nt

[3Hotdogs]

5. Thanks for the info. I use 1234 and a capital letter, so's I'll always remember it.

When I get home, I'm gonna change it to capital letter - 4321.

That ought'a hold 'em for a while.

[Probatim]

10. 1-2-3-4-5!

That's the combination an idiot puts on their luggage!

[Chainfire]

9. I don't worry about hackers

If they want to see how many games of Spades I have won, so be it. One thing for certain, even the best hacker in China or Russia can't get his hands on the money hidden in my mattress.