Security researcher Nick Breese has harnessed the power of the PS3’s cell processor to allow him to crack passwords with only a few hours work – despite formerly taking days to solve.

An Intel chip can go through 10-15 million cycles a second, whereas the PS3’s chip can get through 1.4 billion.

“Brute force” password cracking is a simple method of simply trying every possible combination of characters until the correct combination is found. Having multiple cores in the PS3 chip allows it to try several passwords at once, speeding up the work greatly.

Don’t panic though! You won’t have a PS3 breaking into your bank account any time soon, though, as these eight-character passwords are rudimentary when compared to the sophisticated encryption used to protect online transactions and similar transfers of important information.

Source: BBC Technology