Ever heard of Project Bovine? I am sure many of us would have heard of the Google Compute project. This is where you donate/share a part of your computer processing power, when your computer is idle, to help other "research" projects. Well...This is not a new concept by google. Distributed.net seems to be the internet's first general purpose distributed computing project.

Now when we have a super-computer that does time-sharing with other idle computers and utilizes their processing power, how long will it take to crack a password?

Let's say I have a 7 letter password (all small characters), there could be 8 billion combinations and it might take only 8 secs to crack your password.

Here is an interesting article on how long your password can withstand these brute force attacks.

Now Project Bovine RC5-64 from distributed.net which is considered the fastest computer on earth has recently reached a speed of 76.1 Billion passwords per second!!

Time to change my passwords.....