By now we’ve all heard about hackers using fake COVID-19 maps to spread malware. But the black hats aren’t the only ones chasing the coronavirus. Some white hat hackers are helping scientists hunt for a cure by donating their GPUs to Folding@home.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding. This is important because when proteins don’t fold correctly, this can result in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, cystic fibrosis, some cancers, and, yes, COVID-19. The effort originally spun out of a Stanford University project, and its commercial partners include Intel, Google, Nvidia, and AMD.

Its most recent project simulates how COVID-19 proteins move to better understand how it behaves and hopefully help researchers develop a vaccine. Folding@home is crowdsourcing this effort and asking white hats, gamers, and basically anyone with a computer to download its client and donate processing power to the cause. Earlier this week Folding@home’s co-director Greg Bowman tweeted the “first glimpse of the #CODIV19 spike protein (aka the Demogorgon) in action” thanks to the project’s contributors.

Security company Critical Start and its threat hunters are among the global contributors, and Critical Start’s team is using its hash cracker — this is a GPU-heavy machine that cracks passwords — to run Folding@home workloads.

“You just run the program that Folding@home created and it starts sending distributed workloads to anyone who participates. Then it sends the data back to the researchers,” said Quentin Rhoads, Critical Start’s director of professional services. “Effectively it allows us to do something other than just cracking passwords and being evil. We’re using our powers to help the scientist and doctors and whomever else.”

Rhoads’ Team Ares (this is also the name of the company’s offensive and defensive security brands) is one of the top contributors to Folding@home’s COVID-19-related efforts. But Rhoads emphasizes it doesn’t take enterprise-grade processing power to contribute. “Anyone can do this,” he said. “Individual contributors using a desktop can do the same thing.” It just takes a little longer.

Critical Start’s hash cracking rig takes about 50 minutes or less per job, compared to about two hours per job for a desktop computer, Rhoads said. “We started running this Sunday at noon, and we’re already in the top 3% of contributors, scoring 8,000 out of the 250,000 participants in the feed,” he said in an interview with SDxCentral on Monday afternoon.

That’s also part of the appeal: it has a game-like feel to it. Participants can join teams, and teams win points for their contributions. “Especially with every info-sec person, every tech person working from home for the foreseeable future, this gives them something good to contribute to,” Rhoads said. “You’re not just playing a video game, you can give back.”

As of yesterday, more than 400,000 people have downloaded Folding@home.