Dan Goodin of Ars Technica wrote an eye-opening piece on the astonishing state of password cracking. Passwords once thought a few years ago to be safe enough to outlast a century of cracking attempts can now be broken in a matter of days (or even hours) – with a $1000 computer, no less.
The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.
A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.
via Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.