sun” has 17,576 possible character combinations. 3 letters using the lowercase alphabet = 263 This is of course a highly insecure password, but how much time is enough for a password to be secure?
• a password that can be hacked in 1 minute is far too risky • 10 minutes – still far too risky • 1 hour – still not good enough • 1 day – now we are getting somewhere. The probability that a person will have a program running just to hack your account for an entire day is very little. Still, it is plausible. • 1 month – this is something that only a dedicated attacker would do. • 1 year – now we are moving from practical risk to theoretical risk. If you are NASA or CIA then it is unacceptable. For the rest of us, well – you do not have that kind of enemies, nor is your company data that interesting. • 10 years – Now we are talking purely theoretical.
