The hidden hacking engine in your video card

Our Russian friends at ElcomSoft claim 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 faster than the fastest standard CPU in a PC.

The Massively Parallel Processing hardware in the video card has been found to be ideal for performing recovery at a rate of up to a BILLION password attempts per second.

For example, an eight-character Windows Vista logon password is as strong as about 55 trillion possible passwords. Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could try up to 10 million passwords per second, and perform a complete analysis in about two months.

With GPU technology, the process would take only three to five days, depending upon the CPU and GPU.

http://hothardware.com/News/Russian-Firm-Uses-NVIDIA-GPUs-To-Crack-WPA-WPA2/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/10/graphics_card_wireless_hacking/