How long will it take a Hacker to work out your password?

In the early years of personal computers, there was a wise saying in computing circles that “it’s not if, but when your hardware will fail.” This was to remind users to backup their data and files on external drives to facilitate quick recovery in the advent of a failure. Today, most of us have our data backed-up in the Cloud so the problem of data recovery has become much less problematic.

However, the problem now become the vulnerability of that data (personal and business) to external hackers. So the saying now becomes, “it’s not if, but when you will become the victim of a data hacker.” There are many ways to protect your data, not the least of which is having secure passwords which you replace periodically. The table below gives the statistics on how quickly hackers can break a password and gain access to your data and systems. From these statistics, in short, the best passwords will have the following characteristics

  • 10 to 11 characters
  • A combination of  Uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols
  • You should change your password at least once every 3 months.

In addition to this, use as much layered security on your devices and key sites as possible.

 

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