RTX 4090 8-Card Rig Cracks Random and Powerful Eight-Character Passwords in 48 Minutes

A security researcher revealed just how powerful the new Nvidia RTX 4090 video cars really are, especially when it comes to cracking passwords.

The fact that many users don’t have complex passwords or tend to reuse them extensively on multiple online accounts is not really a secret. It’s one of the most significant cybersecurity issues and is responsible for hacks, data breaches and so much more.

While graphics cards have other uses, it wouldn’t be the first time they’re used for other purposes. If anything, graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 predecessor, the 3090, have been used to fuel the cryptocurrency market for the last couple of years by providing the necessary computing power to miners.

And since they seem so good at crunching numbers, security researchers have started to use them in other capacities.

“First @hashcat benchmarks on the new @nvidia RTX 4090! Coming in at an insane >2x uplift over the 3090 for nearly every algorithm. Easily capable of setting records: 300GH/s NTLM and 200kh/s bcrypt w/ OC! Thanks to blazer for the run,” wrote security researcher Sam Croley on Twitter via TomsHardware.

Simply put, any 8-character password that includes a random combination of lower caps, upper caps, numbers, and symbols care be broken through in just 48 minutes. The only problem is that you would need eight RTX 4090 cards in a specially designed rig, and with an MSRP price of $1500, it’s not a cheap solution.

This is not a hypothetical endeavor. Someone did the work, put the cards together, and performed a benchmark, with the result available on GitHub. The results are impressive for a brute force attack, but in most situations, hackers go after passwords by using dictionary attacks, which are much faster, and use lists of common credentials that have already been leaked in past data breaches.