My 2 Cents:  Seems that there is no longer a truly safe wireless protocol left…its seems that WPA has been cracked as well.  This does not really mean that you should throw away your wireless router merely that you should just be aware that you are not as safe and that changing your password regularly is a very good  idea…

Elcomsoft has been using NVIDIA’s CUDA GPU computing architecture to accelerate its Distributed Password Recovery tool for a while now, but it looks like the latest version of the cracking utility takes it to the next level — it can break a WPA2 password using two GeForce GTX 280-based boards 100 times faster than with just a CPU. It’s still a brute-force crack, but only a few packets need be sniffed, and the GPU accelerates the algorithm used to generate keys significantly — even laptop-grade 8800M and 9800M GPUs speed things up 10 to 15 times. We wouldn’t worry too much about wardrivers with trunk-mounted bladeservers going nuts, however — the base version of the software costs $599, and things ramp up to $5,000 pretty quickly.

wifi

Wi-Fi is no longer a secure form of wireless communication, so says Global Secure Systems. According to their report, a Russian firm has harnessed the GPU processing power of the latest NVIDIA graphics card to accelerate Wi-Fi password recovery times by 10,000 percent. David Hobson, managing director at GSS elaborates by saying,

“Brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time – and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations – but the use of the latest NVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.”

The article unfortunately lacks some key details about the configuration of the WPA/WPA2 encryption that was hacked and the length of time it took for the encryption to be broken; leaving us a little in the dark about the extent of this threat. Nonetheless, individuals and companies that rely on wireless networking may want to follow this report to see if it is confirmed or debunked. Wouldn’t want you to bury your head in the sand and sit complacent while your neighbor’s kid with his uber-gaming rig hacks into your Wi-Fi network and steals Sarah Palin’s email. That could land you up to 5 years in jail. D’oh!

Read

WPA encryption gets hacked; Wi-Fi no longer secure : Boy Genius Report