Back in the old days, the hand of justice used sophisticated, thousand-dollar computers to crack down on sickos on the internet. Although expensive, it's really a small price to pay to put those freaks behind bars. But thanks to the PS3, all they have to spend now is a few hundred dollars. Find out how.

"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, an agent in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

Under the Fourth Amendment, suspects cannot be forced to cough up the passwords to their little hobbies. Luckily, with the help of a search warrant and a processing powerhouse, law enforcers are able to sniff out passwords out of a gazillion possible combinations. The agency used to rely on Tableau/Dell server devices amounting to US$ 1,100. As it turns out, the PS3 has just as much computing power, for just US$ 299.

"You take the ability of a single person to throw a few passwords at it a minute to a few million a second," said Neil Condon, vice president of Public Affairs for AccessData Corp, the company that conducts the investigations. He added that any current gen console can be used for the operation, but they're using PS3s because they can install Linux in them. That said, they're definitely using the fat PS3 models.

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PS3s and passwords:

• Security research uses PS3 for high-speed password hacks