NVIDIA’s new RTX 4090 graphics card is capable of cracking your passwords under an hour

A security researcher named Sam Croley tweeted about how effective Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 graphics card is at cracking passwords. It turns out that even when up against Microsoft’s New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication system and the Bcrypt password-hacking capability, it can decrypt one of your passwords twice as fast as the previous winner, the RTX 3090.

The brand-new Nvidia RTX 4090 is a skilled hacker in addition to gaming. If eight of them are entered into a password-cracking device, which costs a paltry $13K, an eight-character password can be cracked in around 48 minutes.

The Ada Lovelace-based card keeps popping up with new tests to show off what an absolute beast of a GPU it has at its core, and its performance in the HashCat benchmark highlights the AD102 core’s cryptographic prowess.

According to calculations made by other Twitter users, RTX 4090 cards could search through every password combination of a typical eight-character password, comprised of upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and symbols, in less than an hour.

This is valid for the AD102 when compared to the popular enterprise authentication protocol Microsoft New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM).

That considerably lowers the cost of password decryption, therefore you should as soon as possible think about how secure your pet-name passwords now seem. To be fair, though, the top two passwords in use in 2022 will continue to be 123456 and 123456789. Therefore, for the vast majority of passwords, you won’t need costly cracking equipment to get past someone’s basic defense.

However, if a single card were used against a list of the top few hundred passwords currently in use, most passwords might only take a few seconds, or even a few milliseconds, to crack. However, you probably won’t want what is “hidden” behind such shoddy security measures.

You may relax if you were concerned that after playing Cyberpunk all day, rogue RTX 4090s would crack all of your credentials at night.