Wednesday, 19 December 2012

There are a number of ways in which a hacker can get your passwords. The most common is a "brute force attack", in which a hacker simply slams a website with thousands of possible passwords for an account until one is accepted.
In a brute force hacking attack, three simple character changes is the difference between 2.23 hours and 2.21 years to crack your password. For a standard 7 letter password with just lower case letters, there are 8,031,810,176 possible combinations. That may seem like a lot, yet it would only take 2.23 hours to crack such a password using password cracking programs easily available over the web. Adding just 1 number, 1 upper case letter, and 1 symbol results in the password taking 2.21 years to crack.

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