It’ll take hackers just 0.29 seconds to crack into your email or Facebook account if you use “password” or “12345” as your password. Seriously, it’s time to choose better passwords for your online accounts — and make sure they’re unique, too. If you’re not sure about how to go about setting up better passwords, there’s an online tool that will tell you how quickly hackers can break them using today’s tech.
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BetterBuys has built an interactive online password checker that uses benchmarks from Intel and John the Ripper, a password cracking tool. It also features a slider that will let you check a password’s strength against any year from 1982 to 2019.
If you were to set “boygeniusreport” as your password, hackers would need more than 4,000 millennia to crack it using 2016 tech, the site says. The more complex the password and the more distinct characters you use, the harder it’ll be for them to guess it using today’s computers. In 2019, they might be able to do it in about 3,300 millennia.
John the Ripper is a tool that uses various words, letters and phrases to guess a password. That’s why weak passwords are easier to discover while longer ones will take more time.
By simply adding five extra characters to your regular 7-character password, you’ll significantly increase the workload. The site says a 12-characters password could take as much as two centuries to break while a 7-character password is cracked in 0.29 milliseconds.
You can try out the tool for yourself at BetterBuys, where you’ll also find plenty of details about password security and best practices.
