Interesting ..... change the 'normal' 8 char password length to 10 and it goes from 0.11 hours to 77 to brute force..

Hackosis | Brute Force Calculator=

 

It depends if people have changed them after installing things. You would be amazed at the amount of confidential systems and switches that still have things like "password" for superuser accounts, and the kit was installed 3 years ago....

Dave

 

I input 8 characters and 10 and got much higher figures than that?

 

2415.48 days

 

What you should do when defining passwords is to not use passwords at all.

Use passPHRASES

One guy here uses "mypasswordis" (in mixed case) and THEN has a unique last word

Something like MyPasswordIsTh1s1smyp4ssw0rd

As it is made up of easy to remember words the whole thing is easy to remember but next to impossible to crack.

 

Minimum is 8, but 10 or more is best. People often use ! or 1 for an i or l, and 5 for an s, but many hack systems are aware of that ploy and it won't slow attacks down much. Any password based on a dictionary word, even with numeric substitution, is more vulnerable than a random string.

Use 10 or more characters, upper and lower case with numeric and special characters (i.e. !% &). If you can, use a pound sign, as most hacking programs expect a dollar sign!

It has to be easy to remember, or you won't use it, but don't make it something that someone could guess about you, i.e. if everyone knows you're a trekkie, Enterpr!5e is not a good password for you even though it meets other 'strong' password criteria.

 

Wow, try this!

Turn your phone number into special characters, ie:-

01234 567890 turns into )!"£$ %^&*()

Thats 11 special characters including the £ sign and really easy to remember. Gives the following:-

36,028,797,018,963,968 combinations

It takes 131,072.00 hours or 5,461.33 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour.

 

we have 12 character passwords which are forced to be in uper, lower case with at least 1 number and special character, we can not use a word that is in in the english or German dictionary of more than 3 letters and we can not use any part of the previous 6 passwords. It makes it feckin hard to find a password when it comes to changing it.

 

It takes 1,335,263.55 hours or 55,635.98 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.

I like to think Im safe

 

You'll probably get had by a keylogger