NVIDIA Forums Hack: Passwords Not Salted

@ 2012/07/17
A group of hackers that claimed responsibility for hacking NVIDIA forums (forums.nvidia.com), which goes by the name "Team Apollo," posted the first piece of its exploits on Pastebin (find it here). The user data dump contains details of every fifth user of the forums. From what we can tell looking at the pasted data (which is now very much in the public domain), the passwords found in the user tables are not salted. NVIDIA was less than honest about that part.

The passwords are stored as raw MD5 hashes, which can be fairly-easily decrypted (when compared to hashes with salt values). To make matters worse, certain MD5 decryption websites have large databases of pre-decrypted MD5 phrases, potentially making decryption these hashes easy. Or you could just use a CUDA-accelerated MD5 decryption tool, which munches through unsalted MD5 hash values at the speed of a small supercomputer. If you have an NVIDIA Forums account, and your passwords on other websites (forums, email accounts, banks) even remotely resemble that of your NVIDIA forums account, it is strongly recommended that you change your passwords on each of those other websites.


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