Protect Your Company By Boosting Your Password

There are a lot of ways to protect your business’s accounts, but it all starts with a good password. A password that is strong and unique is the first line of defense against cyberattack: If bad actors can’t crack the code, they’re not getting anywhere.

But for all the talk of how a good password can protect you and your data, it’s hard to visualize: What’s the practical difference between a short password and a long one? Or a password with a healthy mix of numbers, letters, and symbols, versus a password with only numbers? A new infographic from Hive Systems shows the difference quite clearly.

In the chart, Hive Systems shows how quickly hackers can brute force different types of passwords in 2023. You can see quickly that a numbers-only password is pretty terrible: If the password is 11 numbers or shorter, a hacker can break in instantly. If it’s 12 numbers long, it only takes a second. In fact, you need to stretch it up to 17 numbers before the time to brute force it goes up to anything more than half a day.

Other types of passwords don’t fare much better, especially the fewer characters there are. But it’s easy to see how a variety of characters, plus length, can make a truly uncrackable password. The best on the list is an 18-character password that uses numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and symbols: It would take a hacker 26 trillion years to crack. Again, uncrackable.

At a certain point, however, it becomes difficult to remember passwords so long and varied. While password managers take care of that problem, the manager itself still needs a master password. The point of the chart is to see you can make a strong password that’s not too difficult to remember: An 11-character password with a variety of characters takes three years to brute force, which isn’t a practical amount of time, either. Find a sweet spot, mix up your numbers, letters, and symbols (like m3R1t_sOLu71onS), and you’ll keep your business and its interests safe.