Originally Posted by
Scott Shepherd
And I'm sure if that were your target, you're not some hack in your parent's basement, you're backed by some serious money, which would allow you to step up to some fairly serious computing power where your supercomputer(s) did nothing but work on the issue 24/7 at a really fast pace. You could spend $20,000,000 on a state of the art computer center that did nothing but work on cracking it, and you'd still make a ton of money if you could ever crack it.
I'm not even sure you'd need mega money to build a cracking setup. I don't understand the theory or practice but I've seen articles where people have built a chassis to hold a number of high end GPUs. As I understand it the sort of math operations that go into rendering 3D graphics are also useful for brute forcing passwords. GPUs are optimized for those math operations. Here's a 2 year old article:
In a test, the researcher’s system was able to churn through 348 billion NTLM password hashes per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM NTLM (NT Lan Manager), for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference.
https://securityledger.com/2012/12/n...ds-in-seconds/