WPA-PSK Passwords Now on Sale…Starting $17!
A cloud-based service called WPA Cracker launched last week promises to crack WPA-PSK (WiFi Protected Access with Pre-Shared Keying) for you starting $17 .
Like any other password-based authentication system, WPA-PSK (and WPA2-PSK) is vulnerable to a “dictionary attack.” This is a brute force technique in which a hacker uses a dictionary or database of commonly used passwords to guess the WPA encryption key. The problem with this approach is that it might take days or weeks to crack even a moderately strong password with a typical PC.
What makes the WPA Cracker service interesting is that it provides you access to huge amount of computing power using a 400-node cluster. The service promises to parse a dictionary of 135 million passwords and email you the results in 20 minutes for $34. If that price tag sounds steep or if you are ready to wait longer, then you can pay $17 to use half the cluster and receive the results by email in 40 minutes.
The service is targeted to ethical hackers that do wireless vulnerability assessment and wireless network penetration testing for a living. But I wonder…what would keep the “unethical” hackers from misusing a cloud-based service like this.
Not every cloud has a silver lining. What do you think?
