Following a recent study by Bloomberg Businessweek, the importance of creating strong and memorable passwords for online accounts has again been brought to attention. With more and more people relying on the Internet to store and access increasingly private information, many wonder how to know if their passwords are safe. As a result, this post presents a summary of the above study as the basis of a simple and quick test that would reveal whether or not your password is strong enough.
Time it takes a hacker’s computer to randomly guess your password:
VERY WEAK PASSWORD
Length: 6 characters
Lowercase: 10 minutes
+ Uppercase: 10 hours
+ Nos. & Symbols: 18 days
WEAK PASSWORD
Length: 7 characters
Lowercase: 4 hours
+ Uppercase: 23 days
+ Nos. & Symbols: 4 years
STRONG PASSWORD
Length: 8 characters
Lowercase: 4 days
+ Uppercase: 3 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 463 years
VERY STRONG PASSWORD
Length: 9 characters
Lowercase: 4 months
+ Uppercase: 178 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 44,530 years
Data: Gartner, Forrester, Duo Security, Imperva, LastBit Software as collated by Bloomberg Businessweek
Overall, it is not only the length that matters but also the right combination of lower-case and upper-case characters, numbers and symbols. If all of this is present, you will definitely stand a better chance of making it more difficult for hackers to crack your password.
Talking Point
Do you know any other way to check the strength of a password?
6 Comments
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silpada
February 22, 2011 at 5:06 am
Good techniques for password and without strong password you cannot survive on the net.
Wholesale Suppliers
February 22, 2011 at 11:23 am
One active user shares a big piece of privacy on internet. Access to some one’s official & personal account means to enter in his personal life and get every thing you want. Merge of upper case, numbers and symbols makes password thats all i know.
Karoline
February 23, 2011 at 3:33 am
Thanks for this post. We have often heard the advice to use uppercase and lowercase and numbers and symbols on our passwords, but putting it this way, with the time it takes to crack a 9-character upper-and-lowercase number-symbol-character password versus a 6-character lowercase-only password really drives home the point! My question now is, would it be all right to use the same password for all my accounts, considering that this single super-password would take 44,530 years to hack?
Admin
March 13, 2011 at 11:59 pm
Lol. Good idea, possibly as long as you ensure that your password is not leaked by any other means.
Computer Smart Phone Technology
February 28, 2011 at 8:41 pm
A good password should include the combination of the following:
Upper case
Lower case,
Number
Symbols
Length.
Paul Salmon
February 15, 2012 at 4:36 pm
When it comes to passwords I agree that we should look at using mixed case, numbers and symbols. However, the length of the password is the most important element in determining the strength of a password. A 15 character password that is comprised of only lower case letters is much harder to crack than a 8 character password that uses mixed case, numbers and symbols (26^15 versus 94^8).