Can Somebody Crack Your Password?

 

The answer unfortunately is yes, How long it would take to crack your password depends upon the length of the password and the method used to crack it. While it may take years to crack a very strong password it is a proven fact that any password can be cracked. This means that no matter how strong your password, it isn't crack-proof.

The method commonly used to crack passwords is known as Cracked software. It works by checking all the combinations of the characters used in a password. To give you the simplest example, if your password is made of only one lowercase character, it would only take trying 26 (a to z)combinations to find it. Add one letter to it and the number of tries increases to 676.

Now as you add more letters or mix uppercase and lowercase characters and other signs and punctuation marks, the number of tries needed to find the password increases astronomically. This is something which you can't do manually. But the password crackers use computers which speeds up the process.

To understand the power of the Brute Force, take for example a computer system trying 50,000 passwords a second. With such a system it would take only 11 minutes to crack a password of 6 lowercase characters. Mix uppercase and lowercase characters along with digits in the password and the time increases to 32 hours.

Now increase the number of characters of the password to say 8 and it would take as long as 15 years to crack it.

Now 15 years is a pretty long time for someone to go after your password. So you may think that that just make a 8-character password with upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols and you are safe. Right? In a way yes. Such a password is pretty strong and should serve you well, though the crackers can drastically reduce the time to find the password by using more powerful machines.

Also remember that the password crackers use the Brute Force method only as a last resort.

First they try to get your password by other means such as dictionary attack and intelligent guessing.

How Intelligent Guessing Works

Many people use easily identifiable words or digits for their passwords. These may be:

The words "password", "passcode", "admin" and their derivatives.

A row of letters from the qwerty keyboard -- qwerty itself, asdf, or qwertyuiop)

Username or login name

Name of a friend, relative or pet

Birthplace or date of birth,

Car license plate number

Favorite celebrity name

Reversing the order of the letters (for example, computer to retupmoc).

A swear word

Savvy password thieves know this tendency of average password user and can easily find them by using various password cracking software.

So if you want to make strong passwords, avoid using the easily-identifiable words and digits.

Make a password which uses at least 8 or more characters made of uppercase and lowercase letters, digits and symbols.

And above all, keep your password safe. click here for more Cracked Software