Tutorials > Passwords - The whole truth

Sometimes we choose a password to secure a login, a document, a network etc believing that no one will ever figure out the name of the wife, of the dog or the date we got married. Not so. Commercially available low cost password breakers, can break a 3 digit password in about 1 second, a four words password in about 8 seconds, a five letter password in about 5 minutes, a six one in about 30 minutes and so on.

A lot of people does not realize that there is a difference between "Mary" and "mary", about 2 minutes of password cracking.
In fact, the possible combinations for "mary" are about 450 000, while for "Mary" are about 7.3 millions.
As we increase the number of characters the gap becomes exponentially bigger, for example a word like "pelicano" takes about 230 million combinations, the word "Pelicano" takes about 2600 billions combinations. Mind blowing isn't?

On a normal pc takes about 5 days of continuous attempts for a 9 (nine) characters password using only low case letters, just by having one of the characters a capital letters would take about 3 months.

Imagine what it will take if we add numbers and special characters to the password (#!*&?-_ etc.).
Our 4 digits "Mar1" would take 14 millions attempts, while a 5 digits "Mary1" would take 91 millions attempts.

As you can see, just one extra digit can make the life of an hacker (or its program) much harder, with any passwords over 8 characters using both capitals, numbers and low cases, basically not practicable to break, and mostly due to time constrains.

On the basis of the above research, to create a very powerful password, does not take a lot. Maybe just replace the letter " i " in the password with the number " 1 ", to read " Milan " like this: " M1lan ", or the " 5 " for the " s " letter or the " 0 (zero) " for the " o " letter. And what about mixing capitals, numbers and small caps?

Examples of strong passwords without becoming mad at remembering them:

• carolina ---> Car0l1na

• myname ---> MyNaMe

• imissyou ---> 1m155y0u

• imissyou ---> !M1s5Y0u

Do you get it? This can save you a lot of headaches and protect better your data, network, spreadsheet etc