In his infinite wisdom, Vladimir Katalov with Elcomsoft has developed tool called MD5 Password Cracker that uses the computing power of NVIDIA graphics cards to recover passwords from MD5 hashes. Very cool. And it’s free.
According to Elcomsoft, for comparison, this type of cracking on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 processor only yields about 30 million passwords per second and around 70 million per second on Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 using all four cores. Using the NVIDIA graphics processor: up to 608 million passwords per second!
This is big folks…Check it out. Now if Vladimir can just come up with a reliable tool for cracking Web application and database passwords we’d be set.