On average, it takes a hacker about two seconds to crack an 11-character password that uses only numbers. Throw in some upper- and lower-case letters, and it will take a hacker one minute to hack into a seven-character password.
How Long Does A Brute Force Password Crack Take
Hive Systems developed a handy chart to illustrate the time it takes for a hacker to brute force your password. A brute force attack on your login details is when cybercriminals use trial-and-error to guess your details.
Cybercriminals use sophisticated software that can run thousands of password combinations a minute, and their tools are only getting better. A general rule is that your password should be at least 11 characters and use numbers, along with upper and lowercase letters. That combination will take hackers 41 years to crack.
According to the tool, the shorter your password, the easier it is guessed. Even if you use all the possible variations. Use eight characters and it will be cracked in hours. Seven characters will be breached in minutes, and six or fewer characters will take mere seconds.
As the chart indicates, to prevent a successful brute force attack on your password, you should have at least 10 characters that use the full range of options. Anything shorter than that, and it will only take a few days to crack.
If you are unsure whether your passwords are strong enough, check out the How Secure Is My Password? tool. By putting in some of your passwords, the system will tell you how long it will take a hacker to crack.
As described in a recent report, Hive found that an 8-character complex password could be cracked in just 39 minutes if the attacker were to take advantage of the latest graphics processing technology. A seven-character complex password could be cracked in 31 seconds, while one with six or fewer characters could be cracked instantly. Shorter passwords with only one or two character types, such as only numbers or lowercase letters, or only numbers and letters, would take just minutes to crack.
Due to the progress in graphics technology, most types of passwords require less time to crack than they did just two years ago. For example, a 7-character password with letters, numbers and symbols would take 7 minutes to crack in 2020 but just 31 seconds in 2022. Given these advances in technology, how can you and your organization better secure your password-protected accounts and data? Here are a few tips.
The calculation for the time it takes to crack your password is done by the assumption that the hacker is using a brute force attack method which is simply trying every possible combination there could be such as:
This is the reason it's important to vary your passwords with numerical, uppercase, lowercase and special characters to make the number of possibilities much, much greater. The larger more obscure the password the greater the curve of time and processing power it will take to crack it. Try our password generator.
Also very important when talking about password security is not to use actual dictionary words. Many hacker programs start with long lists of common passwords and then move on to the whole dictionary. This is much faster than a brute force attack because there are way less options.
A brute force attack when an attacker uses a set of predefined values to attack a target and analyze the response until he succeeds. Success depends on the set of predefined values. If it is larger, it will take more time, but there is a better probability of success.
The most common and easiest to understand example of the brute force attack is the dictionary attack to crack passwords. In this, the attacker uses a password dictionary that contains millions of words that can be used as a password. The attacker tries these passwords one by one for authentication. If this dictionary contains the correct password, the attacker will succeed.
In a traditional brute force attack, the attacker just tries the combination of letters and numbers to generate a password sequentially. However, this traditional technique will take longer when the password is long enough. These attacks can take several minutes to several hours or several years, depending on the system used and length of password.
To prevent password cracking from brute force attacks, one should always use long and complex passwords. This makes it hard for attackers to guess the password, and brute force attacks will take too much time. Account lockout is another way to prevent the attacker from performing brute force attacks on web applications. However, for offline software, things are not as easy to secure.
Brute force is also used to crack the hash and guess a password from a given hash. In this, the hash is generated from random passwords and then this hash is matched with a target hash until the attacker finds the correct one. Therefore, the higher the type of encryption (64-bit, 128-bit or 256-bit encryption) used to encrypt the password, the longer it can take to break.
A reverse brute force attack is another term that is associated with password cracking. It takes a reverse approach in password cracking. In this, the attacker tries one password against multiple usernames. Imagine if you know a password but do not have any idea of the usernames. In this case, you can try the same password and guess the different usernames until you find the working combination.
Now, you know that a brute-forcing attack is mainly used for password cracking. You can use it in any software, any website or any protocol which does not block requests after a few invalid trials. In this post, I am going to add a few brute force password-cracking tools for different protocols.
I am sure you already know about the Aircrack-ng tool. This is a popular brute force wifi password cracking tool available for free. I also mentioned this tool in our older post on most popular password-cracking tools. This tool comes with WEP/WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tools to perform attacks on Wi-Fi 802.11. Aircrack-ng can be used for any NIC which supports raw monitoring mode.
It is available for Windows and Linux platforms. It has also been ported to run on iOS and Android platforms. You can try it on given platforms to see how this tool can be used for brute force wifi password cracking.
John the Ripper is another awesome tool that does not need any introduction. It has been a favorite choice for performing brute force attacks for a long time. This free password-cracking software was initially developed for Unix systems. Later, developers released it for various other platforms. Now, it supports fifteen different platforms including Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS and OpenVMS.
Rainbow Crack is also a popular brute-forcing tool used for password cracking. It generates rainbow tables for using while performing the attack. In this way, it is different from other conventional brute-forcing tools. Rainbow tables are pre-computed. It helps in reducing the time in performing the attack.
L0phtCrack is known for its ability to crack Windows passwords. It uses dictionary attacks, brute force attacks, hybrid attacks and rainbow tables. The most notable features of L0phtcrack are scheduling, hash extraction from 64-bit Windows versions, multiprocessor algorithms and network monitoring and decoding. If you want to crack the password of a Windows system, you can try this tool.
Hashcat claims to be the fastest CPU-based password cracking tool. It is free and comes for Linux, Windows and Mac OS platforms. Hashcat supports various hashing algorithms including LM Hashes, MD4, MD5, SHA-family, Unix Crypt formats, MySQL and Cisco PIX. It supports various attacks including brute force attacks, combinator attacks, dictionary attacks, fingerprint attacks, hybrid attacks, mask attacks, permutation attack, rule-based attacks, table-lookup attacks and toggle-case attacks.
Ncrack is also a popular password-cracking tool for cracking network authentications. It supports various protocols including RDP, SSH, HTTP(S), SMB, POP3(S), VNC, FTP and Telnet. It can perform different attacks including brute-forcing attacks. It supports various platforms including Linux, BSD, Windows and Mac OS X.
THC Hydra is known for its ability to crack passwords of network authentications by performing brute force attacks. It performs dictionary attacks against more than 30 protocols including Telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMB and more. It is available for various platforms including Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris 11, FreeBSD 8.1, OpenBSD, OSX and QNX/Blackberry.
These are a few popular brute-forcing tools for password cracking. There are various other tools are also available which perform brute force on different kinds of authentication. If I just give an example of a few small tools, you will see most of the PDF-cracking and ZIP-cracking tools use the same brute force methods to perform attacks and crack passwords. There are many such tools available for free or paid.
Brute-forcing is the best password-cracking method. The success of the attack depends on various factors. However, factors that affect most are password length and combination of characters, letters and special characters. This is why when we talk about strong passwords, we usually suggest that users have long passwords with a combination of lower-case letters, capital letters, numbers and special characters. It does not make brute-forcing impossible but it does make it difficult. Therefore, it will take a longer time to reach to the password by brute-forcing.
The best way to prevent brute force attacks is to limit invalid logins. In this way, attacks can only hit and try passwords only for limited times. This is why web-based services start showing captchas if you hit the wrong passwords three times or they will block your IP address.
If a rival wanted to hack a website, how easy is it for someone with little experience to download and use tools to brute force a password? How easy is it to pay someone cheap money in a poorer country to perform the hack for you? 2ff7e9595c
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