GPU - ie Radeon 5770 makes even 15 character password unsafe to brute force!

[Spikesoldier]

Now we know why Chinese Government bought all those 4870 X2's.

 

[Voo]

Windows does not mandate locking the account after an excessive number of incorrect logins. However, what NT servers will do, is gradually take longer and longer to verify individual passwords. So after about 3 or 4 wrong attempts, the server will start taking 10-15 seconds to verify the attempts. This will slow the attacker down to a point where attacks are no longer feasible, but still allow legitimate users to log in.

I don't see how that'd avoid a DOS attack. Sure the server can distinguish between different IPs, but that has its own problems and has been implemented in many systems not just Windows domains.

And brute forcing a password over a internet connection to the usual server isn't going to work anyhow (or at least you won't get 3billion trys per second)

 

[Idontcare]

Now we know why Chinese Government bought all those 4870 X2's.

LOL...this year's COT hardware may be more powerful and all the more headline grabbing than last year's COT hardware but you can be assured the top dogs in electronic spying used specialized fixed hardware designed expressly for these purposes and the performance on a normalized basis is going to be a couple order of magnitudes higher than what you see with COT hardware.

What this news tells us is that all the other small-time password hackers (the non-government entity types who are operating on vastly reduced budgets) have access to faster hardware.

 

[Mopetar]

LOL...this year's COT hardware may be more powerful and all the more headline grabbing than last year's COT hardware but you can be assured the top dogs in electronic spying used specialized fixed hardware designed expressly for these purposes and the performance on a normalized basis is going to be a couple order of magnitudes higher than what you see with COT hardware.

What this news tells us is that all the other small-time password hackers (the non-government entity types who are operating on vastly reduced budgets) have access to faster hardware.

Even if the only thing they had were a few slide rules and an abacus, hackers have time and again shown that no matter how secure a system is, that with a little social engineering they can easily gain access to it.

Also reminds me a lot of this xkcd comic.