12 characters safer with modern PCs
Everyone seems to have to more passwords than close friends these days and the combinations of numbers and letters are already difficult to remember but now experts at the Georgia Tech Research Institute are suggesting anything less than 12 characters could be quickly cracked.
The issue is the additional computing now on offer, in particular the processing power of the chips now the norm on graphics cards.
The researchers have discovered that the number-crunching power of modern graphics cards could offer a new way of cracking passwords, with their power on par with multi-million dollar supercomputers built just a decade ago.
The research found seven character passwords ‘hopelessly inaccurate’ and with processing power increasing year on year, a combination of upper-case, lower-case, numerals and symbols in a 12 character password offered better protection.
Do you think passwords are becoming an unsafe security measure?
