2144 - Passwords

Is your password 'password'? How about 123456? Or 12345678? If it is every hacker knows it. It's the passwords they try first when trying to guess passwords.

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.