Ethical hacking: How to crack long passwords

Introduction

They serve as the keys to your financial, social and entertainment worlds online and they are one of the most commonly used tools to verify your identity, but, for the most part, passwords remain relatively easy for hackers to crack. In fact, according to one survey, the average user has at least 27 discrete online passwords that they need to remember, meaning that most users keep their passwords simple, similar to one another and memorable. Fortunately, as an ethical hacker, you may only need to crack just one to get where you need to go.

However, as cyberhygiene increases, password requirements get more complex and cybersecurity awareness training continues to become a regular part of employee training, white-hat hackers will soon find themselves increasingly facing longer, more complex passwords as they perform their craft. 

But, as the saying goes, when there is a will, there is a way. In this article, we will cover the tools and techniques available to help crack or get around longer passwords. You, however, will have to supply the will.

When traditional tools fall short

While Microsoft requires passwords to meet certain complexity requirements, such as a minimum password length of at least eight characters, Google also recommends passwords be at least 8 characters long. 

Although these are just two large players in the industry, it represents a larger trend where users are moving to larger, more complex passwords. Of course, this is occurring because companies know that hackers can use automated tools to break anything with seven characters or less. However, as more characters are added combined with more complex characters, it could easily take a century for these same tools to crack them. In fact, it exponentially grows as more characters are added:

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• 5 characters = 10 seconds
• 6 characters (Read more...)