A German security researcher used a new kind of hosted offering on Amazon s EC2 to decipher password data encrypted using the SHA1 algorithm. Thomas Roth was able to decipher the 14 passwords in 49 minutes, paying just $2.10 for an hour of compute time using 2 NVIDIA Tesla Fermi M2050 GPUs. The ease, efficiency and affordability of cloud based cracking upends long-held assumptions about the economics of trying to brute force strong encryption, he said.
Source: https://threatpost.com/cloud-makes-short-work-strong-encryption-111910/74692/