Password a false sense of security

Next time you have to create one password, with combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, do not think you are safe.

PasswordRandy Abrams, senior security analyst at Webroot, did some simple tests. Count all possible passwords you can create with eight characters, numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters and symbols.

He found that 95 ^ 8 possible combinations can be made (26 uppercase + 26 lowercase + 10 numbers + 33 symbols = 95 characters), which are 6.634.204.312.890.625 codes.

Now suppose someone tries to find your code with a standard brute-force attack. Guess they can try about 31 billion passwords per second. So the code breaking we mentioned above can be done, at most 212,903 , or 3.548 minutes, or about two and a half days.

Now, let's talk about restrictions. Suppose a service you are using requires an eight-character code.

Abrams reports that there are 70,6 trillion 8-letter passwords. This saves the brute-force attack 2,277 seconds, or almost 38 minutes.

But what if, at of security, you use an eight-character password (so you can remember it), and a service forces you to use only capital letters and symbols. It's more so; Is it a more complex password, which makes it difficult for the decoder? Not exactly.

According to Abrams, you just cut 18,5 percent from the potential password group. So in two days, the attacker will discover your password.

If a service requires you to add a number to this password, you have cut the potential passwords to 41 percent. So the attack will last 34 hours, or a day and a half.

 

Abrams states that it is much better to choose a longer password:

Each s character in a password effectively increases the group of passwords. There are 6,5 million times more combinations of words with 16 lowercase characters than there are eight-character codes using all four character sets. This means 'toodlesmypoodles' is much harder to crack than 'I81B @ gle'

Of course after all the above you understand the value of using the two phase authentication (2FA).

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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