A constant concern in this day and age regarding technology is that having your personal accounts hacked.
If you’re juggling hundreds of passwords, it might be time to look into a secure password manager where you hand security over to professionals.
Today’s infographic takes a look at how long it would take a hacker to brute force your password. ‘Brute force’ refers to a type of hacking attack in which an attacker submits many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. With this method, the attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is discovered. One of the many mistakes people can make with technology is to not choose a secure enough password, and attacks like these make this even more evident.
With how systematic this method is, it makes it possible to predict just how long it would take a hacker to crack your password. Using variables such as the number of characters and what kinds of characters are contained in your password, you can get a pretty solid estimate of how long it would take your password to be cracked.
For example, if you have 12 characters that are numbers only it would take a mere 25 seconds to decode this password. But, if you add upper and lowercase letters along with symbols to the same 12 character password, the amount of time increases exponentially, to about 34k years.
Check your own passwords according to these guidelines!