Developer: eight Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics cards can crack an eight-digit password in an hour.

CTOnews.com Austin, Texas-based security analyst Sam Croley, the core developer of Hashcat Crypto Tools, recently tested his password-cracking benchmark tool to see how well the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU cracked passwords, and the results showed twice the performance of the previous generation RTX 3090 GPU.

Croley was asked how long it took to "brute force" an eight-character password, and the results were surprising. For a standard eight-digit password consisting of numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols, the crack time using a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU is estimated to be 6.1 hours, even in the face of Microsoft's new technology local area network Management (NTLM) authentication protocol and Bcrypt password hacking feature. This means that any player with RTX 4090 can crack a common password in a matter of days. Of course, you can use multiple graphics cards for faster cracking.

CTOnews.com has learned that HashCat V.6.2.6. is a well-known password cracking tool that allows researchers to crack user passwords in a small number of cases where they might be needed. In tests, the RTX 4090 beat the RTX 3090 in almost all algorithms, almost doubling its performance. RTX 4090 shines in several attack types available in HashCat software: dictionary attacks, combiner attacks, mask attacks, rule-based attacks, and brute force attacks.

The researchers estimate that a purpose-built password hashing rig (paired with eight RTX 4090 GPUs) can crack an eight-digit password in 48 minutes. According to Statista and 2017 data, 8-character passwords are the most common among compromised passwords, accounting for 32 percent.

But don't worry, easy-to-crack tools like HashCat are often deployed offline rather than online, which means your PC is less likely to be cracked by RTX 4090 players at will.