I  remember my computer security professor telling me that encryption doesn’t make it impossible to decrypt, but rather infeasible to decrypt. Nobody is going to buy a supercomputer to crack your final year thesis, simply because the data isn’t worth nearly as much as the cost to crack it–thereby making it infeasible.

With cloud computing, however, end-users and regular joes like us, have access to very very powerful machines for a fraction of their actual cost (since we’re only renting the machines). Couple that with the high scalability of the cloud , it means that what was previously infeasible, is now a very viable option. In fact what used to be only available to big corporations and governments, now has become available to anyone with a credit card and Amazon account.

I’m not talking about complex mathematical approaches to breaking encryption either, I’m talking about the standard brute force method. Brute Force basically involves trying every single possible password until you eventually find the password that works. In the past brute force wasn’t considered a valid option since trying all those passwords which number in the hundreds of billions, would require a very powerful computer, and most people–not even criminals, had access to that sort of computing power. However, with the advent of cloud computing, powerful hardware is suddenly becoming more available to the general public for low-down prices. What use to cost tens of thousands of dollars per server now cost just 2.60 an hour to ‘rent’.

What if we could use the power of the cloud to crack the average level encryption we have on our zip or excel files? Well it turns out, we can, and it’s results are ridiculous!