When we discuss the GPU Computing (formerly known under the GPGPU acronym), GPU manufacturers will focus on consumer friendly applications such as video transcoding, Folding@Home, Adobe CS4 and so on. But what if you are a power user and for instance, want to harness the power of the GPU for something like… password cracking?
The answer is “have no fear, ElcomSoft is here”. This Russian company is mostly known inside the security elements of governments around the world, such as police, Interpol, secret agencies and all. Recently, ElcomSoft introduced Password Recovery suite with CUDA-enabled cracking of passwords for Outlook PST files, archived files or various password protected documents. First and foremost, I will admit first of forgetting a password for my old PST files from the days on INQ, and Password Recovery helped me a great deal (“promise I’ll never use stupid passwords which I forgot, scout’s honor” 🙂 ).
Today, ElcomSoft announced that the company expanded its support from Nvidia-only to support both ATI and Nvidia with its Wireless Security Auditor 1.0. This application is intended to audit wireless network security by “attempting to recover the original WPA/WPA2 PSK password protecting Wi-Fi Communications”.
Using ATI HD2000 and above or GeForce 8 and above cards, ElcomSoft WSA is currently the fastest Wi-Fi password recovery tool on the market. In order to support both GPU manufacturers, ElcomSoft developed its own patent-pending technologies which expanded on the original CUDA-powered algorithms.
As you cam see, 4870 beats GTX280 hands-down...
There are no limits to how much GPUs can you actually empower, and ElcomSoft is the first company that demonstrated that 800 shaders inside Radeon 4870 can beat 240 shaders inside GeForce GTX280. We’re surprised to see that AMD’s PR department isn’t beating the drums over this achievement, especially after seeing ATI parts trailing Nvidia ones in apps such as Folding@Home, artifact-free video transcoding, Photoshop CS4, Premiere CS4 and so on…
The price of WSA 1.0 is $1199, but until March 1st, 2009 – ElcomSoft offers a 50% discount – yep, $599. If you are a network administrator that wants to know just how secure your network is, the answer is quite simple.
