Russian Firm Uses NVIDIA GPUs To Crack WPA, WPA2

We're not sure what's more frightening about this, the fact that the Russians figured out how to do it or that WiFi networks are effectively now completely insecure.  ElcomSoft claims they can "recover" WPA and WPA2 encypted passwords using any NVIDIA-based graphics subsystem in a workstation, desktop or even a notebook, to crack WPA encyption over 100 times fastest than with a standard CPU.  This might not mean much to the average home user because, let's face it, serious thugs aren't bothering to hack into your home network to leech your bandwidth or steal a single user's personal information.  However, for the corporate sector, this "press release" is a huge wake-up call.  You had best tunnel those WiFi networks over a VPN if you have anything at all that is worth securing, because that scruffy looking kid in the office suite over from you might not be playing Call of Duty 4 on the gaming rig he's plunking around on all day...
 

 Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery supports both WPA and the newer WPA2 encryption used in the majority of Wi-Fi networks, allowing breaking Wi-Fi protection quickly and efficiently with most laptop and desktop computers. The support of NVIDIA graphic accelerators increases the recovery speed by an average of 10 to 15 times when Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is used on a moderate laptop with NVIDIA GeForce 8800M or 9800M series GPU, or up to 100 times when running on a desktop with two or more NVIDIA GTX 280 boards installed. Governments, forensic and corporate users will benefit from vastly increased speed of breaking Wi-Fi protection provided by Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery.

 
 
Source:  ElcomSoft

The software also supports "password recovery" from operating systems, Microsoft Office apps, Adobe PDF, Zip and RAR files.  For $599,  a license of ElcomSoft Distruted Password Recovery supports up to 20 clients.  So now, the average LAN meet (especially over yonder in Russia) may just be one big distributed computing hack-a-thon.  You think they'll support AMD ATI Radeon GPUs eventually?  Nah....