Services that test a password strength can help users in evaluating their passwords. Will it take days, years or even longer to crack a selected password? That’s what How Secure Is My Password will tell you.

Just head over to the service’s website and enter a password in the form. You do not necessarily have to enter a password that you use actively. You can alternatively enter a comparable password to find out how long it would take to hack your password with a brute force, or maybe a combined dictionary and brute force attack.

Experienced computer users know that they need to pick passwords that contain upper and lower case letters, digits as well as special characters to make it secure. Length suggestions vary from 12 to 16 in most cases. The How Secure Is My Password service suggests to use passwords with a length of at least 16 characters.

The password checker can be an eye opener for users who are using weak passwords. You can try out the service here or check our How Secure Is A Password guide for suitable alternatives.

But the service is not only displaying the time it would approximately take to hack your password, it also displays information and tips that can help you select a more secure password. In addition, it compares the selected password against the list of the top 10k passwords used on the Internet.

The estimated time to hack a password is based on the processing power of a modern desktop PC. Depending on the infrastructure used, it may take considerable less time to hack a password.

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.

Every letter now equals between 1-3 chars in the password chart. For example A=88, B=tr3 and C=?. If you did not opt to include numbers and punctuation the password chart will be filled with upper and lower case letters only. Now type a usual password that you use into the second form and see how the letters are substituted by the chars of the passwords chart. Lets say we choose the password ABC which would be converted to 88tr3?. Guess which one will be easier to brute force ? Right..

It is of course not really convenient to remember 88tr3? or larger sequences but that is not necessary either. Save or print the password chart and look it up whenever you forget the new password. Printing would be even better than saving it to the computer because no one on the internet will have access to your password chart then.

My thanks fly out to Thunder7 who found this website and is sending me a lot of great links. Keep up the good work Thunder, I really appreciate it.