Password Security Scare

A team led by Richard Boyd from the Georgia Tech Research Institute has suggested that the growing use of graphics cards as surrogate supercomputers could spell trouble for users of short passwords.

Graphics Cards now have similar number crunching abilities to the multi-million dollar supercomputers built about a decade ago, said Mr Boyd.


The parallel processing systems inside graphics cards are very good at carrying out so-called "brute force" attacks that effectively try every possible combination of letters and numbers until the right one is found.


This means that a password of seven characters or less could soon be "hopelessly inadequate". The researchers suggest passwords should be at least 12 characters long to be safe. Ultimately users will need to rely on whole sentences that are a mix of numbers and letters to ensure no-one else can guess their passwords.