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How Secure is Your Password?
I am sure at one point everyone wonders if the strength of their password is sufficient. Or some of you may feel that your password is strong. Are you sure? What is the definition of Strong when considering passwords?
A strong password is a complex combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols with the minimum number of characters as the programme allows. Are you sure?
A password with a character length of 16 was recently cracked using different methods, especially using brute force or dictionary attacks. These types of attacks require a lot of CPU processing, however with the new NVIDIA CUDA platform, this process can be much quicker.
Research from an unsettling study showed that a team of hackers managed to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords – from a list of 16,449 as part of a hacking experiment for a technology website.
The success rate for each hacker ranged from 62% to 90%, and the hacker who cracked 90% of hashed passwords did so in less than an hour using a computer cluster.
The hackers also managed to crack 16-character passwords including ‘qeadzcwrsfxv1331’.
Brute force cracking is a method used by application programs to decode encrypted data such as passwords or Data Encryption keys, through exhaustive efforts using brute force. Just as a criminal might break into, or “crack” a safe by trying many possible combinations, a brute force cracking application proceeds all possible combinations of characters in a relevant sequence. Brute force is considered to be an infallible, yet time-consuming, approach.
The best practise for password is not only the combination of letters numbers and symbols used, but also the frequency of when you are changing passwords. This way you ensure that even if someone takes your password (let’s say it’s relatively strong) and decrypts it after some weeks, the hacker can no longer use it as you have already changed it.