Researchers Discover a Cheap Method of Breaking Bitcoin Wallet Passwords (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Three researchers have published a paper that details a new method of cracking Bitcoin "brain wallet passwords," which is 2.5 times speedier than previous techniques and incredibly cheap to perform. The researcher revealed that by using a run-of-the-mill Amazon EC2 account, an attacker would be able to check over 500,000 Bitcoin passwords per second. For each US dollar spent on renting the EC2 server, an attacker would be able to check 17.9 billion password strings. To check a trillion passwords, it would cost the attacker only $55.86 (€49.63). In the end, they managed to crack around 18,000 passwords used for real accounts.