A presentation at Kiwicon security conferece demonstrated the use of the powerful Sony PlayStation 3 chip to crack eight-character passwords in hours. By implementing common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing, Nick Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10–15 million cycles per second — in Intel-based architecture — up to 1.4 billion cycles per second. Eight-character passwords are used to protect PDF, Zip and Microsoft Office files.

Further information can be found on the BBC website or Computerworld.