Print
If you thought that your 8 character WPA password was secure, think again. Thanks to the handy-dandy GPU, cracking weak WPA/WPA-2 PSK passwords has never been easier.
According the Elcomsoft, their Wireless Security Auditor can work completely off-line and find passwords by analyzing a dump of network communications, and display them in plain text.
What this means, is that if you’ve got a WPA protected network, you should probably bump your 8 character password up to at least 12 characters. According to David Hobson, “It's a wake-up call to IT managers, pure and simple. IT managers should now move to 12 and even 16 character keys as a matter of urgency. It's not very user-friendly, but the potential consequences of staying with eight character keys do not bear thinking about.”
Image Credit: Elcomsoft
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/andysalisbury
[2] http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/24/gpu-accelerated-wi-fi-password-cracking-goes-mainstream
[3] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/google_readying_searchable_newpaper_archives
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/daily_news_brief_security_flaw_discovered_in_skype
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/leaky_addons_make_big_security_risks_firefox_users
[6] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/gpu
[7] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/wifi_0
[8] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/wireless
[9] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/wpa
[10] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/news
[11] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/login?&commentfragment=comments_top_anchor