RTX 4090 knocks out passwords in record time: bad news for cybersecurity

Keep your password safe Netflix or gmail It looks like it won’t be as easy as expected. Even without having much characters At the same. And the reason for this is NVIDIA’s new graphics card, the RTX 4090. By the way, you won’t believe how powerful it is.

Sam Crowley, a security researcher and password cracking expert, has published performance tests showing the ability to crack the RTX 4090 password.

The new NVIDIA GPU broke previous RTX 3090 performance records and doubled performance on almost every algorithm tested. The cracked passwords followed best security practices and included random letters, symbols, and numbers.

Judging by the test results, a fully equipped password hashing machine with eight RTX 4090s will have the processing power to perform 200 billion password repetitions out of eight characters in 48 minutes.

The result in less than an hour is 2.5 times faster than the previous RTX 3090 record. Both tests were conducted using only commercially available GPU hardware and related software.

The first @hashcat benchmarks on the new @nvidia RTX4090! Goes crazy > 2x growth over 3090 for almost every algorithm. Easily breaking records: 300GH/s NTLM and 200kh/s bcrypt with OC! Thank Blazer for the run. Full tests here: https://t.co/Bftucib7P9 pic.twitter.com/KHV5yCUkV4

— Chick3nman (@Chick3nman512) October 14, 2022

The Hashcat software offers various types of attacks designed to facilitate password recovery or, depending on the user, unauthorized access to third-party accounts. These attacks include dictionary attacks, combinatorial attacks, mask attacks, rule-based attacks, and brute-force attacks.

Many of the attacks available on Hashcat and other password cracking tools can benefit from predictable human behavior, which is often the result of poor security practices.

How they crack your Netflix password

For example, an attack might first target well-known words, terms, or patterns in an attempt to minimize the time it takes to crack a user’s password. It’s very common to reuse passwords for your Netflix and Gmail accounts, right?

Well, using this type of lists and data in an attack can reduce the time it takes to crack a password from 48 minutes to milliseconds.

Although the results of the comparison may seem disturbing, it is important to note that this method is only theoretically dangerous, as modern software and current security protocols prevent the GPU from trying millions of combinations of the same thing. password without hacking the firewall.