How Quickly Can Your Password be Cracked?

[JMH]

Security breaches of mind-numbing size like those at LinkedIn and eHarmony.com set crypto- and security geeks to chattering about weak passwords and lazy users and the importance of non-alphanumeric characters to security.

And insisting on a particular number of characters in a password is just pointless security-fetish control freakishness, right?

Nope. The number and type of characters make a big difference.

[ Stupid security mistakes: Things you missed while doing the hard stuff ]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/257282/how_quickly_can_your_password_be_cracked.html

 

[zigzag3143]

HOWTO securely hash passwords

In the wake of a series of very high-profile password leaks, Brian Krebs talks to security researcher Thomas H. Ptacek about the best practices for securing passwords. The trick isn't to merely hash with a good salt -- you must use a slow password hash that takes a lot of work, so that making rainbow tables is impractical.

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