How secure is your password?
November 4th, 2008 by Andreas from Xavier Media® in Antivirus & Security. Topics: SecurityMost of us think we use a secure and hard to guess password, but not many of us know how fast it can be guessed by a normal PC. I've earlier mentioned how important it is to select a randomly generated password instead of using just a dictionary word (a word listed in any dictionary not just an English dictionary) just to increase the security.
Now you can calculate how many hours it will take a normal PC to guess your own password. Check out this new tool at the webmaster tools section at XavierMedia.com.
By just filling in a few details about your password you get an estimate of how fast your password can be cracked. This may be extremely scary information for most of you, especially if you use a dictionary word as password.
For example an eight character long dictionary work ("password" 
) will take a normal PC with a load of about 10% less than 1 minute:
Your password is 8 characters long and has 390,625 combinations.
It takes 0.00 hours or 0.00 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.
Horrible scary isn't it? 
If we make one of the characters upper case and add just one number somewhere in the password ("p5sswoRd") we improve the results, but not by much at all:
Your password is 8 characters long and has 80,318,101,760 combinations.
It takes 0.29 hours or 0.01 days to crack your password on computer that tries 137,438,953,472 passwords per hour. This is based on a typical PC processor in 2008 and that the processor is under 10% load.
Based on the statistics above I can only recommend you to use a completely random password with both upper case and lower case letters, numbers and special characters (like #, $, &, – and +).
Check it for your self at this page. If you after the calculation decide to change your password to a random one we have a password generator available for you .
About the authorAndreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.
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November 5th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Good article! Thanks putting them into numbers.
Just to share that I found the password practices very useful, makes a lot of sense:
https://mashedlife.com/best.php
November 5th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Great post. It's true, when you see it in real proportions, it hits home.
After creating a strong password, it is always a good idea to protect these well thought out gems.
I work for an online password manager – creating, storing and protecting passwords is what we do best : )
http://www.passpack.com
Louise
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