How Long It Would Take To Hack A Password

November 28, 2011

Password strength has become more of a issue in recent years. While it has always been important to select secure passwords, advancements in processing power and distributed computing (for instance cloud computing) have made it more of a pressing matter. Passwords that may have taken weeks or years to crack in the past are now crackable in days or even hours. That’s a big security issue considering that many computer users are still selecting weak passwords as their account passwords.
Services that test a password strength can help users in evaluating their passwords. Will it take days, years or even longer to crack a selected password? That’s what How Secure Is My Password will tell you.

Just head over to the service’s website and enter a password in the form. You do not necessarily have to enter a password that you use actively. You can alternatively enter a comparable password to find out how long it would take to hack your password with a brute force, or maybe a combined dictionary and brute force attack.

Experienced computer users know that they need to pick passwords that contain upper and lower case letters, digits as well as special characters to make it secure. Length suggestions vary from 12 to 16 in most cases. The How Secure Is My Password service suggests to use passwords with a length of at least 16 characters.
The password checker can be an eye opener for users who are using weak passwords. You can try out the service here or check our How Secure Is A Password guide for suitable alternatives.
But the service is not only displaying the time it would approximately take to hack your password, it also displays information and tips that can help you select a more secure password. In addition, it compares the selected password against the list of the top 10k passwords used on the Internet.
The estimated time to hack a password is based on the processing power of a modern desktop PC. Depending on the infrastructure used, it may take considerable less time to hack a password.
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Source :
http://www.ghacks.net/