"Security experts have started to connect the dotted lines between password-seeking cyber crimnals and low-cost services like Amazon’s EC2.
"At the July 2009 Black Hat Conference, security expert Haroon Moor of SensePoint talked about the potential for hackers to use Amazon’s EC2 to build password-cracking programs. This inspired security consultant David Campbell to run the numbers at his blog. He calculates the cost of cracking a password, based on Amazon’s $.30/hour rate.
"The conclusion: a simple eight-character password would cost only $45 to break. That’s for a password that required only numbers and lower-case letters."
