How to create a 'super password'

[Evil Eye]

Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords. The 12-character era of online security is upon us, according to a report published this week by the Georgia Institute of Technology.





The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours.





But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/in...index.html?hpt=Mid#fbid=rIZvYIYTQ1u&wom=false

 

[N!ck]

I once had a 21-character long password before.

 

[The Dragon Master]

I have a uhh... *counts* 16 long password

 

[Evil Eye]

Mine's 23

 

[Genie]

Mine's 11 letters... damn I'm adding another letter now.

 

[Kasynlie]

Mines a 9 character combination of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters.

 

[Genie]

Does anybody know if symbols such as @ and ! count in passwords?

 

[Wolvendeer]

This is, of course, assuming that your password hash has been cracked and the opposition is bruteforcing your password with either a super computer or a cluster of omputers, similar to a botnet. Given the power of the computer the speed at which your password will be cracked varies, and they say that it would take 17,000 years; however, given a botnet powerful enough to take a small country off the internet, who knows how long your password would stand up? If your password is susceptible to a dictionary attack, even if you use l33t speak to swap letters for numbers, even more so. If the attackers were using rainbow tables, though, it would be a much shorter deal entirely(if they had the appropriate entry in the table).



Now, for your average guy trying to brute force a forum or your email, it would be an exercise in futility as long as you had a strong, non-dictionary based password and the website had a lockout set after a certain number of incorrect attempts.



Symbols, to answer your question, definitely count, and they add another level of difficulty entirely to cracking your password. instead of 36^length it is -- I'm not entirely sure, but you get the point.