Most persons will make their password as easy as 1-2-3 or A-B-C and therefore, make it easy for almost anyone to guess it. Most hackers gain access to password protected accounts simply by guessing the password or use a technique called "Brute-force Attack". This is why it is important not to use weak passwords. The "Brute-force Attack" technique is the most-used method of cracking passwords. This technique uses all the possible permutations of letters and numbers until the correct password is found.
How Long does it Take to Crack or Guess a Password?
- If your password is 4 characters long and consists of lower case letters only, it will take approximately 456,976 attempts to guess your password.
- If your password is 4 characters long and consists of numbers only, it will take approximately 10,000 attempts to guess your password.
- If your password is 4 characters long and consists of lowercase and uppercase letters and numbers only, it will take approximately 14,776,336 attempts to guess your password.
- If your password is 8 characters long and consists of both lowercase and uppercase letters and numbers only, it will take approximately 218,340,105,584,896 attempts to guess your password.
Looking at the statistics above, you will realize that if you use a combination of lowercase, uppercase letters and numbers, it makes your password harder to crack or guess.
The longer your password is, the harder it is for a "Brute-force Attack” to successfully guess your password.
To make your password even harder to crack or guess, you can add special characters (none numeric and alphabetic characters) like *, @, #, $, %, +, !, ? and others.
Although the number of attempts above seems very large, it will actually take between a few seconds to a day for a typical home computer to perform these operations.
If you want to know how many attempts it will take to crack or guess your password, use the formula below (^ = Exponent):
- If your password consists of numbers only: amount of guesses = 10 ^ length of password
- If your password consists of lower case letters only: amount of guesses = 26 ^ length of password
- If your password consists of lowercase letters and numbers only: amount of guesses = 36 ^ length of password
- If your password consists of lowercase and uppercase letters and numbers only: amount of guesses = 62 ^ length of password
- If your password consists of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and special characters: amount of guesses = 80 ^ length of password
Here are the most used passwords which are easily guessed.
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- abc123
- qwerty
- monkey
- letmein
- dragon
- 111111
- baseball
- iloveyou
- trustno1
- 1234567
- sunshine
- maste
- 123123
- welcome
- shadow
- ashley
- football
- jesus
- michael
- ninja
- mustang
- password1
Please avoid using these passwords because these are the first passwords a hacker will try to use to gain access to your account.
Please remember to change your password every three months or less and do not share it with anyone, even if a technical or customer service representative asks you for it.
In today's world, there are millions of persons online who use the internet daily to do business, and this number continues to grow daily. Hackers and scammers have a new territory where they can carry out their illegal activities and the only thing that stands between these internet users and cyber criminals is a password.