Have you ever wondered how long it would take for a typical computer bought in 2008 to brute force your passwords? Now you can find out with the Brute Force Calculator. While it does not provide scientific results it could be interesting to see how long it could take to brute force your passwords to make sure they are hard enough to crack.
To explain the brute force concept in a few words. It basically is a method to try every possible combination until the right password has been discovered. Passwords that use lots of characters and make use of the complete char set including upper case, lower case, numbers and special chars are harder to brute force.
The Brute Force Calculator lets you enter the amount of chars of the password divided into upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters.
According to the script a single computer can brute force a password consisting of seven lower case chars and one number in 29 minutes while a password consisting of 7 upper case, 7 lower case, 1 number and 1 special char would take 3,129,145,610.89 days to crack on a single machine.
All based on a computer that is able to try 137,438,953,472 combinations per hour. The script is basically interesting for users who are still using short passwords who do not make use of the complete character set possible. It shows them that someone could crack their password in a short amount of time not even taking into consideration using distributed computing to brute force the password.
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.Related Articles:
WiFi Protected Setup PIN Brute Force Vulnerability DiscoveredMake your passwords stronger with password chart
Password Recovery Software PicoZip
Secure Password Generator
How to reset the Master Password in Firefox
0.56 hours? I can’t believe it.
Their logic is flawed. A hacker won’t know the specific combination of Upper/Lower/Special/etc. characters in your password, let alone the specific order that they are arranged in.
OJ a hacker does not need to know those factors, he only needs to know the password requirements, e.g which characters are allowed and if there is a max / minimum in length and characters.
Funny, if the website owner stored all those passwords and used it to hack your accounts or made them public.
iampriteshdesai try the tool first before commenting on it; will you?
Hmm…this is the third password checking utility I’ve seen today and that includes my own. Why is today the popular day for this? I had no idea either.
in this case, special characters doesn’t include special ascii characters, which i have used in the past.
one of my passwords, 10 characters long takes: 115.08 hours – but if it did contain a non-standard special character – i am sure it would take an exponentially longer amount of time.
Nice. My passwords take 83,193,411,718,698,672.00 days to crack. I guess that’s what you get with passwords with an average length of 20 characters.