With increasingly powerful equipment systems, hackers can crack passwords more easily.
Recently, a security company called Hive Systems published their latest research on password strength and the ability to crack them. According to the company, an 8-character password (containing only numbers) can be cracked in just 37 seconds.
Meanwhile, if you apply the rules of setting a complex password well (including letters, numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters and special characters and are 8 characters long), it will take hackers up to 7 years to crack them. lock up. It can be seen that Hive Systems has emphasized the importance of complexity to combat password cracking.
The data sheet details the strength of passwords and the time it takes to crack them.
Research also shows that the minimum password length of 8 characters is also an extremely important "key". Because if you set a password with complex content, but only containing 7 characters, the cracking time will decrease sharply to 1 month. Meanwhile, if you set a password that is 18 characters long and only has numbers, the cracking time will be up to 11,000 years.
Hive Systems researchers also said that password hashing algorithms to protect data are getting stronger every day, in addition to being more commonly applied, making it difficult for hackers to crack passwords. increasingly difficult.
Accordingly, Hive Systems' research shows that the 8-character password with the highest complexity, using the MD5 password hash algorithm, can be attacked by a hardware system consisting of 12 of today's most powerful RTX 4090 graphics cards. cracked in 59 minutes. But when switching to the bcrypt hashing algorithm with the same password setting, this number increased to 99 years.
Compare MD5 (upper table) and bcrypt (lower table) hash algorithms.
Hive Systems CEO Alex Nette commented that the cybersecurity industry has made significant progress in protecting user data. However, hackers are constantly developing new attack methods to bypass these security measures.
Mr. Nette also warned that the time it takes to crack a password will increasingly decrease due to the development of computing technology. This can lead to users accepting security risks to access certain websites, creating opportunities for hackers to attack.
