Brute-force attacks are now much more of a threat to short passwords, given the increasing computational prowess of computers, says research scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. In a nutshell, a password consisting of just seven characters is slated to be “hopelessly inadequate”–even if numbers and non-standard symbols are used. Their recommendation, therefore, is to use passwords of at least 12 characters. One culprit would be the increasing availability of high-powered graphics processing units (GPU); today’s top GPU offers about two teraflops of parallel processing powers. As a comparison, senior research scientist Richard Boyd noted that the world’s supercomputer in the year 2000 yielded a computing performance of just slightly more than seven teraflops–and cost $110 million. Joshua Davis, another research scientist involved in the project noted that length is a major factor to protect against brute force approaches. He said, “A computer keyboard contains 95 characters, and every time you add another character, your protection goes up exponentially, by 95 times.”
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Use passwords of at least 12 characters to protect against hacking
