If you’re bored and looking for a semi-productive way to kill time, head over to the site ‘How Secure is my Password?,’ where you can spend a few quality minutes test-driving new, ultra-impermeable passwords. We have no idea how accurate or scientific this is, but it looks as if it’s been created by a repentant ex-hacker. After typing in any random word or combination of characters, the tool will automatically tell you how long it would take a desktop PC to crack your code. It’ll also tell you if your password happens to be among the top 500 most common, which means it can apparently be cracked in less than a second. (The dubious top 500 list, as we found out, includes ’123456,’ ‘baseball,’ and a whole slew of various expletives, but ‘Switched’ is conspicuously absent.)
Interestingly enough, the security of your password seems to be directly determined by the number of characters. ‘Alberteinstein,’ for example, would take a computer just as long to crack (204,000 years) as any other 14-letter combination. Just add a ’1′ to the end of ‘Alberteinstein,’ though, and the estimate jumps up to 700 million years. We banged out a series of random keys, and, after a few attempts, got one random combination that would reportedly take a PC “154 nonillion years” to break — or, about as long as it would take you to remember it. [From: TheNextWeb]
‘How Secure Is My Password’ Tool Lets You Know How Transparent You Are originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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