Technology company Hive Systems has just updated its password table for 2024. How easy is it for hackers to crack your passwords? Unfortunately, this doesn't make for easy reading!
When was the last time you had the passwords do you use to visit websites? Your email? Bank apps? Hive Systems first published its table in 2020, showing how long it would take a hacker to crack passwords from a simple 4-character number code to a 16-character password made up of letters, numbers and symbols. They use hardware and software that are freely available on the Internet.
Here are the findings, and hopefully no one reading this uses a six-digit password, because any half-competent hacker can bypass that instantly. That is not 10 seconds or 2 minutes but “immediately”.
Even easier with AI
Just mix it up and make a combination of 8 lowercase and uppercase letters and it takes a little longer: one minute! Add numbers to the mix and it all takes five minutes and if you enter one or two symbols we are up to 12 minutes. Still not very secure and now AI makes the job of hackers even easier because ChatGPT has a lot of tools that hackers can abuse.
The Hive systems research focuses on the idea that the hacker works in isolation and has to start from scratch to crack your password to show the maximum time required. However, if your password was part of another breach or used dictionary words, your password will be found immediately.
The good news is that it takes 119 years to crack a 16-character password consisting of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. So the next time you're asked to strengthen your password, it might be worth taking note.
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