If you see one of these in your conf room, call security!!!

ps3 I know this story broke a couple of weeks ago, but I was on vacation.  But I did think this was interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, the game consoles we use are really powerful computers so don't underestimate their capabilities.  Second, what should we be doing to react?

What am I talking about?

I was cruising some of the blogs I link to so I naturally hit Kim Cameron's Identity blog.  An article there caught my eye.  That blog of course links to the BBC story which as far as I can tell is the source.

Here's an excerpt from the BBC story:

"Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.    Typically, previous attempts to crack such passwords took days to get the same result."

As you can see, it's a pretty scary thing to think about.  Now what do we do about it?  Sixteen character passwords?  Multifactor authentication?

So like I said, if you see someone using a game console in your conference room, they may not be blowing off some steam after a hard days work.  They may be hacking your network.