A modest cracking rig would be able to go through every single possible password combination of an eight-character password in less than an hour.

Cryptomining's off the cards, but it turns out the new Nvidia RTX 4090(opens in new tab) is a dab hand at hacking and not just gaming. Stick eight of them in a password cracking rig—for a paltry $13K—and you can break an eight-character password in just 48 minutes.  

The Ada Lovelace-based card keeps popping up with new metrics to prove just what an absolute beast of a GPU it's got at its heart, and its showing in the HashCat benchmark highlights the cryptography chops of the AD102 core.

The performance was highlighted by security researcher, Sam Croley(opens in new tab), who tweeted on Friday (via Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab)) that there's "an insane 2x uplift over the 3090 for nearly every algorithm." In the same thread he also pointed out that it's just over three times faster than AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Crunching the numbers, other Twitter users have suggested that would mean a modest collection of RTX 4090 cards could go through every single possible password combination of a standard eight-character password—including upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols—in less than an hour.

That's with the AD102 tested against Microsoft's New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication protocol, which is something you'll see in place in a whole lot of enterprise situations out there.

That's massively cutting the cost of password decryption, which should have you right now looking at just how secure your pet-name passwords are looking right now. Though to be fair, in 2022, the most common two passwords(opens in new tab) are still 123456 and 123456789. So, for the vast majority of passwords you're not going to need an expensive cracking rig to get through someone's simple security.