Cybersecurity threatened by common password buster.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: TECHWIRE

A seven-character password is "hopelessly inadequate," say scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

A password with 12 characters may be just as vulnerable.

GTRI researchers have proven that an inexpensive graphics processing unit (GRU) can bust passwords at the speed of a $100 million supercomputer. Until recently, GPUs were difficult to use for anything other than graphics on a computer monitor. But new software has allowed them to be programmed using the popular C language. This enables a technique called "brute forcing," a high-speed procedure that involves trying every combination of characters to figure out a password.

A password consisting of eight lower-case letters can be cracked in a few minutes using a cluster of GPUs, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist and project lead. This puts at risk everyone from the casual user logging into an email account to larger network used by banking...