Nvidia forums have been hacked and encrypted passwords gained, from their newsletter....

[steve2470]

Dear NVIDIA Forum User,

We suspended operations of the NVIDIA Forums last week in response to suspicious activity and immediately began an investigation. We apologize that our continuing investigation is taking this long. Know that we are working around the clock to ensure that secure operations can be restored.

Our investigation has identified that unauthorized third parties gained access to some user information, including:

• username
• email address
• hashed passwords with random salt value
• public-facing “About Me” profile information

NVIDIA did not store any passwords in clear text. “About Me” optional profiles could include a user’s title, age, birthdate, gender, location, interests, email and website URL – all of which was already publicly accessible.

NVIDIA is continuing to investigate this matter and is working to restore the Forums as soon as possible. We are employing additional security measures to minimize the impact of future attacks.

All user passwords for our Forums will be reset when the system comes back online. At that time, an email with a temporary password, along with instructions on how to change it, will be sent to your registered email address.

As a precautionary measure, we strongly recommend that you change any identical passwords that you may be using elsewhere.

NVIDIA does not request sensitive information by email. Do not provide personal, financial or sensitive information (including new passwords) in response to any email purporting to be sent by an NVIDIA employee or representative.

Check back on the NVIDIA Forums for updates.

*looking for decent link now*

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Nvidia-Phandroid-Online-Forums-Hacked-Passwords-Stolen-250501/

[grok]

1. Oh, the Irony...

The most interesting development being discussed in the Nvidia forum was the use of CUDA technology for other than graphics display.

Each Nvidia graphics card essentially has tens to hundreds of imbedded CPU cores. When run in parallel they can be used to attack computer problems that in the past were impractically slow to solve using ordinary PCs.

These problems range from complex weather/physics simulations, video transcoding to cryptography.

For example encrypted password hashes. Once it one would normally only be able to attack a hash maybe 20-200 times a second using a home computer. It is now commonplace to do the same at a 80-100k/second rate using Nvidia CUDA tech. One already a achieved million/sec using a cloud of 10 nvidia-enabled instances.(Imagine somebody being able to check a billion passwords against your hash in under 15 minutes)

Needless to say this is probably NOW being done with what was captured at the Nvidia Forum.

Another good reason to use long and complex passwords.