08 December 2009, 16:24

WPA Cracker cloud cracks Wi-Fi passwords

Administrators can now check their Wi-Fi networks for weak passwords without major financial investment. US vendor WPA Cracker offers the pertinent service. For $17, it will use half of its cloud of 400 CPUs to perform a dictionary attack on WPA keys. The attack is reportedly based on a list containing 135 million entries "created specifically for WPA passwords".

According to the vendor, jobs generally take an average of 40 minutes. For twice the fee the results may be had in half the time. However, WPA Cracker can provide no guarantees: If the key isn't contained in the dictionary, it won't be able to identify it.

Prospective customers have to provide a network traffic sample created in PCAP format using a tool like Aircrack-ng and the sample must be no larger than 10 MB. According to the vendor, the dictionary attack is not only suitable for WPA, but also for WPA2.

Another vendor recently demonstrated that the passwords used for encrypting PKZIP archives can in some cases be established for a cost of $2,000 using cloud services.

(crve)

« previous | next »

Print Version | Send by email | Permalink: http://h-online.com/-880182