Hackers can guess any password of 5-7 characters in just a few seconds, warned Kaspersky Lab's chief expert Sergey Golovanov, noting that it doesn't matter whether the password is numeric, letter or mixed.
„From a password with a length of about 15 characters, the time begins, which is already acceptable, in the bad sense of the word for hackers - thousands of years of hacking. If the password is 16 characters long and includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters, then the password is considered good. But in the case of companies, unfortunately, you have to convince 10 thousand of their employees to come up with such passwords“, Golovanov added.
Over the past 20 years, one of the most popular password options has been the password “password“ and its variations, such as “p@rol“, “password“, “par0l“ and “paro1“. “Then everyone comes up with something, let's say, as far as he is inventive.“ “But it is important that such combinations are limited in number“, he noted and recalled the existence of programs that themselves come up with variations that a person could use.
The expert added that even if the password database stolen by hackers has some weak protection, on a computer with a good video card - it allows 15 million password guessing attempts per second - it is possible to calculate seven-digit passwords “in less than one second“.