According to Yahoo News Network, Daily Mail and other reports on the 10th, according to new research, any password with six characters, whether it contains numbers and symbols, can be immediately cracked. The way to guarantee that your password won't be cracked for about 438 trillion years is to use 18 characters made up of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and symbols. Of course, each input takes quite a long time.
Is your password okay? Source: Daily Mail
"If you use the same password on multiple websites, your life is not going to be good," Hive Systems, a Richmond, Virginia-based U.S. cybersecurity firm, wrote in a blog post. "We reviewed cipher data breaches from 2007 to the present to see what the attackers actually tried to crack and whether that would change over time."
According to the results of the study, any password with six characters, whether it contains numbers and symbols, can be cracked immediately. The same goes for anything that is seven or eight characters but consists only of numbers or lowercase letters, which can be guessed in about 39 minutes, and an 11-character password that will be cracked in about 34 years.
On the other hand, the way to guarantee that your password won't be cracked for about 438 trillion years is to use 18 characters made up of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and symbols.
Hive Systems has produced a table (pictured) showing the security of user passwords Image source: The Daily Mail
In light of the new study, experts urge the public to use more complex passwords with unique combinations of letters and numbers, as well as two-factor authentication (2FA).
2FA requires the user to provide additional information, such as a PIN code sent via SMS as well as a password.
Last month, London-based swipe machine provider Dojo analyzed data from the UK government's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on 100,000 compromised passwords.
Most used passwords in 2021 Source: The Daily Mail
It found that "123456", "qwerty" and "password" — all of which are easy to remember — are among the most commonly hacked passwords.
Naveed Islam, Dojo's chief information security officer, believes that the public has been using simple passwords because of "password fatigue."
"Attackers exploit these well-known coping tactics to make individuals vulnerable," he added.
Dan DeMichele, vice president of product management at Password Manager provider LastPass, calls strong passwords "the first and most important line of defense against cyberattacks."
"A strong password is at least 16 characters long, including uppercase and lowercase letters and a mix of numbers and symbols," he said.
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