The latest graphics cards from Nvidia have been heavily touted for their support for CUDA, a framework that lets them offload math-intensive parallel processing tasks from a computer's CPU. Now, that very capability is being exploited by hackers to break the WPA and WPA2 encryption standards on Wi-Fi networks, according to reports in various news sources.

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Russian firm Elcomsoft claims brute force attacks can now crack such passwords upto 100 times faster than previously possible, and is offering this capability in its program, Distributed Password Recovery, which is freely available. With such power available in ordinary consumer hardware, questions about the security of Wi-Fi networks will certainly be raised again around the world.