How Secure Are Your Passwords?

Last week I wrote a piece on the five most crucial password security tactics. One of those tactics was to create and use longer passwords. Ironically, that same week?Hive Systems?released a new?report?about passwords and the time it takes to crack them.

Thanks to the availability of considerable compute resources in cloud computing services like AWS, the commonly used eight-character-long password can be broken in less than forty minutes. This password contains all four of the character sets - numbers, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and symbols. If you only include three of the four sets, the time it takes drops to seven minutes.

The Hive Systems report strongly supports the fact that longer passwords are more secure. For instance, creating a password with all four of the character sets, a twelve-character password would take 3,000 years and an eighteen-character password would take 438 trillion years. In conclusion, longer is definitely better!