|
What about complex passwords?
No
doubt, users of passwords containing simple letter and
number combinations will be concerned by the findings above.
At least, they should be. But what happened when Devakumar
introduced special characters into his passwords?
|
|
So
what constitutes a safe password?
Sorry, but you must be the judge of this. We
see that a 9-character password containing symbols in addition to
letters and numbers will take up to 7 years to crack but, as GPU
processing speeds increase, so this time will reduce.
More importantly, the number of characters is not the sole factor
here. The results above clearly bear out the advice we have offered
previously - namely, that the more complex the password, the longer
it will take to crack. For example, it took Devakumar less than 2
seconds to crack a 10-character password containing only numbers and
longer passwords still may not be any more secure if they contain
dictionary words or place names.
"While the raw figures given here are true,
they do not give the full picture," says Mike Orton, Technical
Director at Delta Comtech. "Almost all user accounts are
protected by a “lock out” mechanism which disables the user account
after a certain number of failed logins. This means that a “brute
force” attack will only get to try a couple of passwords before the
account is disabled. There are stealth attacks, which will only try
a password every few minutes, but inherently the delay this
introduces makes cracking a very long process."
Click here
to read Vijay Devakumar’s blog entry.
|
