Hackosis Calculator: Test Your Password Strength - Strong or Weak?
By cgull8m
Even without sharing our passwords, hackers can use different computer techniques to crack the passwords. Hackosis calculator gives an idea how strong the password and how long it will take a computer program to crack a password.
Hackers widely use the "dictionary attack" or the "brute force" method to break a password. And many of them use these methods to find the password without using a super computer.
The "dictionary attack" method uses mostly words in the dictionary to guess the passwords and may add a number at the beginning or in the end for best guesses. The "brute force" method uses a crypto analysis techniques to find more complex words that has a combination of "alpha" "numeric" and "special" characters in them.The Hackosis calculator uses a PHP program to find how strong your password is. Once you enter the count of various characters such as lowercase, uppercase, numbers, special characters, phrase, etc., it tells you how long it will take for an average computer to crack.Here is one example from Digital Inspiration:
This tells that it will take the computer about two months to guess a strong password with 5 lowercase, 2 uppercase and 4 numbers in an 11 character password. But if you have passwords like "test" or "abcd" or "123" or "rainbow" etc., then it takes far less time to crack them.
Here is another example for the password I use for one of the sites, this password I generated from Roboform, a random password generator.
It takes a longer time to crack this password compared to the previous one. I used 18 characters (6 uppercase, 8 lowercase, 4 numbers) in my password.
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Comments
Trsmd, we don't have to enter the original password. Just calculate the number of "uppercase", "lowercase", 'number" characters and enter that numbers only. It will provides an estimate. Hope this helps. I use Roboform, it can generate random combinations, very useful. If you have Firefox, then you can use Roboform and it remembers your password wherever you visit.
In my opinion, using a program to save a random generated password is not worth the extra security.
For personal use, even Internet banking, you are fine with 6-8 characters as you cannot brute force a system across the web, due to the limited number of password entries.
Thanks Alex, I think if we have an OpenID system it will be good to surf the web, but since not every site accept OpenID, we have to create numerous passwords for different sites. I have been using Roboform for the past five years, I paid only once, but they gave free updates till now without charging additionally unlike other programs, where you have to pay for every year and for updates.
Thanks cgull8m, i will look into this as i have about 70+ passwords as i dont trust any company i give it to, so i never use the same password at more than one site! i can also remember them all off the top of my head with my system!
Compu-smart, thanks, this Roboform I use remains only in your computer, so there are no worries. Also, try changing passwords every year, that will also help us protected. I have about 100 + sites, without software like Roboform I will be in deep trouble remembering them.
Trsmd 3 years ago
If we enter our password and test, will they have control over our pasowrd? or can they misuse?