Want to know how long it will take to recover your lost password if you use a bruteforcer to guess the passwords?
Check this out: Password Recovery Speeds
It will take 22,875 years if your password length is 8 with mixed combinations. 😮
Another Malaysian Technology Blog
As someone who has ‘recovered’ mixed passwords before, I can assure it takes, at most, weeks to recover a password. Having said that, it doesn’t hurt to use mixed passwords. My password recovery software was, admittedly, altivec-enabled, so it was computing 128-bit chunks.
OTOH, you can shorten the time needed by assuming the password is 8 chars long, thus skipping 1-7 chars. On secure networks, this is a good assumption.
Well some people use simple combination passwords. And sometimes they use words that we can get from the dictionary. 🙂
In this case, it was none of the above. The password I “forgot” was actually pretty strong. Don’t take my word for it; use John the Ripper on your password hash. Set John to start at 8 chars. You’ll see what I mean. The password I forgot was ‘pac1west’ which isn’t succeptible to dictionary attacks…
Really? But I think it depends on how bigger your dictionary file is if you are using Dictionary Attack. :d