How good are your computer passwords?
Posted by Harry Bracegirdle
on Sep 8, 2011
As cyber crime continues to grow at an alarming rate we are continually being urged to use "strong" passwords when using our computers online. Many people ignore this advice.
The following article is sourced from the Gizmo's freeware site entitled How Long Would Your Password Take To Crack? You can follow the links to test your password.
It might prompt some of you to consider changing your passwords!
If you saw the recent press coverage about the
hackers who managed to breach Sony's systems, you'll know that they
managed to discover millions of users' passwords which were stored in
the systems' databases in an unencrypted form.
Most reputable systems, including Windows itself, store your password
in an encrypted form, and there's no way to reverse that encryption to
discover the original password. The only option is to simply try every
possible combination, in what's known as a brute force attack.
Trouble is, computers are very good at doing brute force attacks, and
a decently powerful desktop computer can try tens of millions of
combinations every second. Ironically, the biggest improvement to
password-cracking software in recent years has come about because of the
availability of hugely powerful graphics cards. With the right
software, the chips that normally render 35 fps of Grand Theft Auto 9
can now crack passwords instead.
So now you know why security experts always tell you to choose a
long, complicated password, which preferably contains numbers and
punctuation characters rather than just letters. Because a password
which consists of a combination of entries from a 26-character
repertoire (a-z) is much easier to crack than if the range of characters
is 52 (a-z and A-Z) or 62 (including digits too).
If you've ever wondered just how secure your favourite password is, here's a simple web site that will tell you. Just go to www.howsecureismypassword.net
and start typing. As you type, the indicator is updated after every
character to tell you, approximately, how long a desktop PC would
typically take to crack it.
Go to www.howsecureismypassword.net to see how long it would take a computer hacker with a good computer to crack your password. If you are worried about the security of this site (as I was) you can put in an alias password that has a similar form. i.e. if your real password is marylou56 then put in something similar like aryloum56 with an identical number of letters and characters. The result would be similar. Try thinking up a password with a greater combination of letter, numbers (and even spaces) to see the effect.
By the way, the Gizmo site has a lot of very good, free software that you might like to explore. Go to http://www.techsupportalert.com/