From an ARTICLE on passwords...
Before we examine what good passwords look like, it helps to know your adversary. Using a PC with inexpensive multicore graphics processing units (GPUs), a hacker can try about 8 billion password combinations in a second—thousands of times faster than just a few years ago...
8 billion passwords a second. At around one million words for a good dictionary that's about 1000 dictionaries worth of words a second.
Using just 4 of the 256 ASCII characters in a password it would take 1/2 second to check the 4.3 billion possible combinations. Go up to 8 characters and the combinations jump to 18 x 10 to the 21st power. But people have a tendency to just use lower case letters so that drops it back to 5.4 trillion characters. The would take 679 seconds or not quite 12 minutes to check.
So here's a break down on passwords from the article..
Password: Aquarius
Time to Crack: 9.08 Mintues
Password: Aquarius1
Time to Crack: 1.59 Days
Password: Aquar$ius1
Time to Crack: 19.24 Years
Password: Aqu57ar$iu3s
Time to Crack: 17,400,000 Years
I didn't check the times quoted here but a 12 character (or more) mix seems like the way to go. The combinations calculate out to 79 x 10 to the 27th power.
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8 comments:
So combining upper/lower case, numbers and symbols make good passwords but the trick becomes remembering complex passwords--unless you modify words like:
B!11!ons
V3r5!ons
N0rm@l
or maybe
P@55w0rd
This is great info as to why you should go beyond the simple passwords.
I'm making my passwords more complex now!
John - True but the hackers know to check a vowel substitute of 3 for e.
Angel - I need to change more of mine.
Heidi - Y3sUsh0u!d.
I know this but it makes me crazy.
I can't remember them as it is.
While I don't use anything as simple as password I have been known to use a word plus my birthday. which is 3,4,56.
So I'm sure I can be hacked if they figure out the first word in italian.
Peg - I don't know if they would check Italian dictionaries or not but the numbers would raise the bar on being hacked.
I've started doing the whole sir-mix-a-lot on the passwords, and am also trying to use different passwords on different platforms.
My passwords are so good that even I can't figure them out.
Jay
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