Hackers using Playstations to crack Passwords

A reader of my blog actually pointed me to that (thank you Shoaib) and asked me for a comment. Here is the article: PlayStation a hacker's dream. It is really an interesting thing: Gaming consoles today have quite some computing power, so why should the bad guys not use them to do some brute force? There is an interesting quote in the article: "Breese's presentation comes just weeks after Russian company Elcomsoft claimed to have accelerated password cracking by a factor of 25 by using the processors found on PC graphics cards."

I never thought about that up until today but it is pretty natural to use this processing power and leverage it. It could even get worse: What would happen if the criminals could compromise the online gaming part on the console and do some remote code execution. They could do some interesting grid computing (during the time your console is idle) and distribute the calculation and brute force attack into different consoles – an interesting approach ;-)

Roger