I just read an interesting article from lifehacker.com that can be found here regarding the security of passwords. I know many of you have seen at least one of the crazy passwords that BestMacs has made for secure use, and many of you may have probably wondered why? Well, this article highlights the reasons why passwords like the ones we use are so secure.
One thing I wanted to highlight is a cool table on the site showing how long certain passwords would take to break by using a program that would try every possible combination of characters. The table breaks up the passwords into character length and whether or not the password uses all possible characters including capitol letters, symbols and numbers compared to just lowercase letters. The table is fully available from the link above however, I wanted to highlight some interesting things I found from the table. Namely, the difference in time between cracking a 7 character password that is only lowercase characters which is 2.23 hours, compared to one that is 7 characters but uses lots of characters which takes 2.21 years a difference of about 2 years, give or take 2 hours. Even more staggering is that when a password uses 9 characters and is composed of symbols, capitol letters and numbers it can take a computer 20 millennia to run through every combination until it finds the right one.
What is so interesting about the article is that it was written from the mindset of an unethical hacker, detailing exactly how he would attempt to find a users password and for each instance he also explains how the end user can safe guard against it. So if you wanted to know how to better protect yourself password wise or are just curious about all things technological, this article is one that would be good to check out with a lot of practical value.
Posted by josh on Mar 31, 2010 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
