According to https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_... if you built a chip that could could test a password with a single increment of a counter, and that chip was the most efficient chip theoretically possible, and you built a dyson sphere to capture all the sun's energy to run the chip, it would still take 32 years to crack a 192-bit symmetric crypto password.
ASICs may well be involved, but they'd need math advances or implementation bugs rather than just brute force.
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Could it instead be ASIC technology on a massive scale? This might help break some of the hashing through very specialized chips.
According to https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_... if you built a chip that could could test a password with a single increment of a counter, and that chip was the most efficient chip theoretically possible, and you built a dyson sphere to capture all the sun's energy to run the chip, it would still take 32 years to crack a 192-bit symmetric crypto password.
ASICs may well be involved, but they'd need math advances or implementation bugs rather than just brute force.
In fact if/when someone comes up with a working attack it will probably require ASICs to run cost effectively.