The Power of Length in Your Password

ByWalter Wimberly

[Tweet “If you want your password to be strong, it should be long.”]

With computers getting faster and faster, the old rules to passwords are being updated. Also remember that hackers can use multiple machines to try to hack a password, so having a longer password will make it harder for them to hack.

7 characters can be hacked in about 14 minutes, while 11 characters takes 4000 years. Each new letter increasingly adds to how long it will take to hack your password.

Swapping a few characters for special characters can help, but nothing like making your password longer.

Hint – use a phrase so it is easier to remember. For example “LongPasswordsAreBetter” would take 447 quintillion years to break.Strong Passwords are Longer

[Image via Bruno Santos via Compfight cc]

The Power of Length in Your Password was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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