Turning clouds into crackers: $45 a password

“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.”

Complete Story