What is Hacking
Background: Passwords Are Easier To Crack Than Ever
Our passwords are much less secure than they were just a few years ago, thanks to faster hardware and new techniques used by password crackers. Ars Technica explains that inexpensive graphics processors enable password-cracking programs to try billions of password combinations in a second; what would have taken years to crack now may take only months or maybe days.
Making matters much worse is hackers know a lot more about our passwords than they used to. All the recent password leaks have helped hackers identify the patterns we use when creating passwords, so hackers can now use rules and algorithms to crack passwords more quickly than they could through simple common-word attacks.
Take the password "Sup3rThinkers"—a password which would pass most password strength tests because of its 13-character length and use of mixed case and a number. Web site How Secure Is My Password? estimates it would take a desktop computer about a million years to crack, with a 4 billion calculations-per-second estimate. It would take a hacker just a couple of months now, Ars says:
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