If your password consists of no more than six digits, consider it not at all: even an amateur hacker can steal your data instantly. A strong password today is at least 12 characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Important: the password must be randomly generated.
Changing your password regularly is an unpleasant but necessary task: as computers improve, it becomes easier for hackers to penetrate other people’s accounts. If your password consists of no more than six digits, consider it not at all: a pro hacker can steal your data instantly. A strong password today is at least 12 characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, writes the Daily Mail, citing experts from the cybersecurity company Hive Systems. They have prepared a table that clearly shows how vulnerable your password is, based on the number and variety of characters used in it, and how many seconds/minutes/years it will take for a hacker to guess it.
The easiest way is to guess the password, consisting of only numbers. It will take 12 second to crack a 1-digit password, and 18 days to crack an 6-digit password.
To secure your data, you need a randomly generated password of at least 12 characters, consisting of a combination of numbers, special characters, uppercase and lowercase letters. With the current state of computer technology, it will take a hacker 53 years to guess it.
These requirements are much stricter than most modern guidelines, including the guidance of the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States, which recommends the use of an eight-character password containing numbers, both uppercase and lowercase letters, and special characters. Today, such a password can be calculated almost instantly: the speed of data processing on the best graphics processing units (GPUs) of the consumer class allows it.
The best GPU of 2022, regardless of whether you were engaged in gaming or amateur crypto mining, was the RTX 4090, Hive Systems writes. As a comparison of password cracking speeds between the RTX 2080, RTX 3090, and RTX 4090 shows, the range of truly strong passwords is shrinking every year. Another important point is whether the hacker uses budget computing equipment and a desktop computer, albeit with a first-class video card, or whether he is associated with professional organized crime and uses cloud computing resources for hacking. Of particular concern today is the potential hacking power that the hardware behind ChatGPT may possess. ChatGPT is based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which consists of a network of approximately 10,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Such a network has much more power than conventional video cards.
It is important that the password must be randomly generated. A self-invented password, even if it uses a complex set of numbers, symbols and letters, is more vulnerable. “People are pretty predictable,” experts explain.