SRINAGAR: This era is literally a ‘password era’. From getting into your office, to accessing your bank account or to watch a film or make a phone call, it is a password that is basic. A compromised password means an individual’s life is compromised. You many have many passwords and if one goes, all others run the risk of getting compromised.
Thousands of hackers are working round the clock to hack a password. There are open market hardware’s and software’s that aid hackers in snatching passwords. There are already three billion passwords that have been compromised, so far.
Specops Software, a Sweden based password management and authentication solutions software company recently published a report about how much time the hackers require to brute force a password. The company modelled the study on the output of Hashcat password recovery software using an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card, said to be the fastest gaming card on the planet.
Based on its data, the survey said that the security of a password depends on its length and use of characters in the password. The most secure is a 22-charecter password that has lower case, upper case, numerical and symbols mix in it. Currently the 8-dogit password is mostly in vogue but the survey suggests that even if it a complicated combination, it still can be cracked with three hours. The most secure passwords require numerous characters and use of all the four types of characters – upper case alphabets, lower case alphabets, numerical and symbols – in a key board.
Password cracking is now getting some help from the artificial intelligence as well.
Most of the people have stopped using the plan text passwords because these are too simple. Now it is a mix of characters and numerical with quite a few using symbols as well. In most of the cases, the passwords rarely cross a 10-charecter.
The AI will make the passwords vulnerable to attacks. It is in the interest of the individuals to choose a password that suits their requirements in number and mix of characters. The system which store people’s data may also require permitted the individuals to enjoy the flexibility of changing, improving and upgrading the passwords. All organisations are password protected but the clients usually are not.
The study outcome led Shafat Qazi to go public. “Most passwords can be hacked in 31 seconds or less,” Qazi, who founded BQE software company in US said. “Do yourself a big favour! Change all your passwords today to at least 12 characters in length. Make sure it includes upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols.”
