Most password security is ?hopelessly inadequate?

The increased computational power offered by running the GPU as a parallel processor to the CPU has rendered shorter passwords almost useless.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute have found that the parallel processing architecture of GPUs are very effective at ‘brute force’ attacks, whereby the computer simply bombards the security software with a range of alphabetic and numeric combinations until one works.

The findings have led the team to call for longer passwords to be used as standard, suggesting a twelve-character combination of letters, symbols and digits.

“Right now we can confidently say that a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate – and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase,” said Richard Boyd, who headed up the Georgia Tech Research Institute research team.