GPUs democratize brute force password hacking

It seems that the provision of increasingly powerful GPUs, when combined with brute-force password cracking tools, is making it increasingly easy to crack passwords — even supposing they’re extremely well thought out, with symbols and quirky capitalization and all that. How short is simply too short? In step with computer scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, ” a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate, and as GPU power continues to move up annually, the threat will a higher alternative, he suggested, could be a 12-character combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and digits. For sure, processors are only getting more powerful and hardware cheap — soon even seven-plus character passwords may become the digital equivalent of unlocked doors. And if that weren’t bad enough, a contemporary study by an online security company called BitDefender has determined that some 250,000 user names, email addresses, and passwords used for social networking sites are freely available online — and seventy-five percent of these folks use an identical password for their email and social networking. So, when dreaming up fancy new twelve character passwords, make sure to’re creating unique passwords for all of your various accounts. It’d be a shame in the event that your Starsky & Hutch FanFicForum account left you liable to identity theft.