Aside from pushing wicked-looking visuals on your play-through of Resistance: Fall of Man, it appears that the Sony PlayStation 3's picked up a penchant for cracking codes as well.

This according to security researcher Nick Breese of the Auckland-based group Security Assessment, who had used the console to crack an eight-character password in just hours. By comparison, more conventional brute force attacks would have taken days to get the same result.

Breese attributed the PS3's code-hacking capabilities to its Cell processor, which he reported to be capable of achieving 1.4 billion cycles per second. By comparison, a high-end Intel chip could punch out 10-15 million cycles per second.

Breese did note that while the PS3 could make (relatively) short work of eight-character passwords - the sort used to protect items such as PDF and ZIP files - more elaborate encryptions such as those used by web transactions can't be hacked. Breese presented his findings earlier this month at the Kiwicon security conference.