June 12, 2012

How fast can your password be broken?



Two cases that happened recently where million LinkedIn and eHarmony.com users' passwords were hacked make people realize about how important it is to make a password that is difficult to be hacked.

One of the easiest ways to enhance the password security level is by adding letters and numbers also add special symbols or non-letter characters like @,%,^,&, or *, especially those that are used rarely.

Longer your password and more vary the characters, hackers will have more difficulty in hacking your online account.

This is because Latin alphabet only has 26 characters, while standard keyboard has 95 letters and symbols that can be used to make difficult combinations.



How hard is it to break passwords that have special characters?

Here are some combinations of possibility from six to ten characters passwords (including letter and numbers, including capital letter and lowercase) as well as six and ten characters passwords that are added with one special symbol.

The numbers below are taken from Interactive Brute Force Password Search Space Calculator, as quoted from PC World:

Six character passwords without a special symbol: 2.25 billion combinations possibilities


- Time that is needed to hack a password like this online by using a web app that is able to make a thousand prediction per second: 3.7 weeks.

-Time that is needed to hack a password like this offline with server computer or high performance computer that is able to make a hundred billion predictions per second: 0.0224 seconds.

Ten character passwords without a special symbol: 3.76 quadrillion (3.76 million billion) possibilities

-Time that is needed to hack a password like this online by using a web app that can make a thousand predictions per second: 3.7 weeks.

-Time that is needed to break this kind of password offline with server computer or high performance desktop computer that is able to make a hundred billion predictions per second: 10.45 hours.

If we add even just one special symbol to our passwords, it will multiply the number of possibilities:

Six character password with a special symbol: 7.6 trillion possibilities


-Time that is needed to hack a password like this online by using a web app that can make a thousand predictions per second: 2.4 centuries/240 years.

- Time that is needed to break this kind of password offline with server computer or high performance desktop computer that is able to make a hundred billion predictions per second: 1.26 minutes.

Ten characters passwords with special symbols: 171.3 Xextillion (171.269.557.687.901.638.419) possibilities


-Time that is needed to hack a password like this online by using a web app that can make a thousand predictions per second: 54.46 million centuries/ 5 billion 446 million years.

- Time that is needed to break this kind of password offline with server computer or high performance desktop computer that is able to make a hundred billion predictions per second: 54.46 years.

Besides adding the number of possibilities, special symbol usage in password is useful to avoid "dictionary attack," which is hacking attempt by taking words directly from dictionary. For maximum security, a password at least must contains combination of 10 letters and numbers also one or more special symbol.

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