Passwords that are short and simple can indeed be cracked in a couple of seconds. Those passwords which contain long and complicated ones can’t be cracked for millions and millions of years.
According to a new analysis by Hive Systems, a cybersecurity firm located in Richmond, Virginia, which reveals how long the hacker would take to crack the passwords protecting your most essential online accounts.
According to the data, an average hacker can break an eight-character password with a balanced mix of digits, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and symbols in under eight hours. Any hacker who understands what they’re doing could break anything shorter or less sophisticated in minutes, even if they’re using basic equipment.
If your passwords are less than 8 characters long, change them immediately, a new study says
Short passwords are easy to remember, but they provide several security risks. When you use a simple password for your convenience, you risk losing access to your account, but simple passwords can be guessed without any technological knowledge.
Most individuals use their date of birth as their password since it is easy to remember. They don’t realize that by doing so, they’re making it simpler for hackers to get into their email and social media accounts. Hike, a cyber security firm based in California, has discovered that cracking a password of less than eight characters takes just seconds.
We normally select passwords that are easy to remember. When we are extra careful, we use a password with a good mix of uppercase and lowercase, special characters, and digits. However, according to Hive’s analysis, even the reports and passwords that we believe are more difficult to break can be decoded by an inexperienced hacker in around eight hours.
According to the research, a hacker can crack any password without any complexities instantly without high-end tools. If the password is longer than eight characters and contains a combination of upper case, lower case, special characters, and numerals, it may take more than a trillion years to break.
According to a chart created by Hive, it takes nine months to break a password with 18 characters made up entirely of numbers, and 23 million years to crack a password made up entirely of lower case letters. Sixty-one million years to crack a password made up entirely of uppercase and lowercase letters, and 100 trillion years to breach a password made up entirely of numbers, uppercase, and lowercase letters. As a result, the odds of an account being hacked with such a password combination are almost nil. Since your password is almost hard to crack, you will never lose access to your account for the rest of your life.
“Cracking” is defined as “creating a list of all possible character combinations on your keyboard and afterward hashing them out.” Hackers can find out your original password by identifying similarities between this list and the hashes of the stolen passwords, allowing them to enter into your favorite websites.
You’re in for a bad time if you’re using the password on multiple sites.” It’s also a good idea to use separate passwords for each account since if you use the same password across all of your social media accounts and it’s hacked, all of your accounts are likely to be compromised. While using a lengthy password is recommended, the possibilities of forgetting it outweigh the risk of losing access to the account due to hacking.
Using many characters that are distinct from one another is the simplest method to make your password more difficult to guess. Always use Lowercase, uppercase, numerals, and special characters. Also, avoid using obvious subjects such as your passwords, such as your birthday or your dog’s name, since anybody who knows you well would be able to guess it.