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How Many Seconds Would It Take To Crack Your Password?
DillyTonto writes "Want to know how strong your password is? Count the number of characters and the type and calculate it yourself. Steve Gibson's Interactive Brute Force Password Search Space Calculator shows how dramatically the time-to-crack lengthens with every additional character in your password, especially if one of them is a symbol rather than a letter or number. Worst-case scenario with almost unlimited computing power for brute-forcing the decrypt: 6 alphanumeric characters takes 0.0000224 seconds to crack, 10 alpha/nums with a symbol takes 2.83 weeks."
Legit what?
The man is an idiot. Adding one extra capital, number or symbol to a password does not increase password strength that much. The algorithm assumes that all places in the password can be all characters.
6 random lower case characters = 26 ^ 6
5 random lower case characters + one upper case = 26^6 * 6 NOT 52 ^ 6
4 random lower case characters + one upper case + one number = 26 ^ 5 * 10 * (6 * 5) NOT 62 ^ 6
3 random lower case character + one upper case + one number + one symbol = 26 ^ 4 * 10 * 8 * (6 * 5 * 4) (based on that only 8 symbols are commonly used)
Legit my ass.