Strong Passwords are Important!

Seeing these Graphics Cards in one PC you may think that this would be used for Crypto Currency mining, but the same process to mine can be utilised to guess passwords.

With the most expensive graphics card on the market at the moment, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, it is able to use certain tools to guess up to a billion or more passwords a second - depending on the algorithm used of course.

A very basic way of cracking passwords is called a Brute Force Attack. How this is done is by a hacker stating what they think the password is in terms of lowercase, uppercase, symbols, and numbers. If the password was 7 characters long, and all lowercase, this could be guessed in under a fraction of a second. This is going in sequence of aaaaaaa, then aaaaaab, aaaaaab and so on.

This is why most services require you to have a minimum of 8 characters that aren’t easy to guess, and adds extra complexity. If your password is 10 characters long with a mixture of lowercase, uppercase, symbols, and numbers it would be unfeasible to crack.

We’re not out of the woods yet though! Millions of passwords are leaked every year. You can check for yourself if your passwords have been leaked by going to: Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach

With these databases of leaked passwords, hackers collate the information and also use this as a way with the graphics cards to crack your password.

So it is always best to create a random password of up to 10+ characters and not repeat the same password for multiple services.

COMPUTER CLINIC CAN ASSIST WITH SETTING YOU & YOUR BUSINESS UP WITH PASSWORD MANAGERS - GIVE US A CALL OR FLICK US AN E-MAIL