The Importance of a Strong Password

I wanted to write a blog explaining the importance of a strong password for online and offline use.  With the growth of technology and the ability to save your entire personal and financial history on your computer and online accounts, it is important to secure your information from unwanted predators.  A Hacker guessing a victim’s password is the way that most information is stolen.  So stay away from using passwords of names of friends and family, birthdays, and social security numbers.  Hackers use applications to dictionary and brute force attack your account to gain access to your information.  A dictionary attack checks to see if your password is a word that is in the dictionary.  A brute force attack tries a combination of a predefined set of characters.  If the attacker knows your password is all numbers, they can input 0-9 into their program and it will gain access to your account within a minute.  I am going to provide some information about how quickly an attacker can hack an account.  The following examples are for a user who uses 7 characters in their password.  If a user created a password and ONLY used numbers as characters, it would take an attacker less than 1 minute to gain access.  If a user created a password and ONLY used either lower case letters or ONLY used upper case letters as characters, it would take an attacker about 13 minutes to gain access.  If a user created a password and used a combination of lower and upper case letters as characters, it would take an attacker about 28 ½ hours to gain access.  If a user created a password and used a combination of lower case letters, upper case letters, and numbers as characters, it would take an attacker about 4 days to gain access.  If a user created a password and used a combination of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers, and symbols as characters, it would take an attacker about 87 days to gain access.  This makes a huge difference in whether an attacker will be persistent enough to hijack you information.  We can take this example even further and add one more character to a combination of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers, and symbols and it would take an attacker about 23 years to gain access.  So please make sure to have strong passwords and change them every 90 days.  Don’t become a victim.


Reference
image url: http://dukecomputer.com/blog/2010/08/4-password-dos-and-donts/