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How Long Does it Take to Hack a Password? See If Yours Is Secure

May 6, 2024

2–3 minutes

How Long Does it Take to Hack a Password? See If Yours Is Secure

The theft of passwords from social networks, messaging apps and email services is becoming increasingly common.

Although it is possible to prevent hackers from accessing our data, the effectiveness of attacks depends on several security factors.

One of them is the type of password we use for various online services.

Although there are websites that can check how secure a password is in a few seconds, knowing in detail how long it takes a hacker to obtain it helps a lot.

According to La Vanguardia, which cites the company Hive Systems, a password that includes special characters, upper and lower case, is much more complicated to hack than a simple password.

Hive Systems, a computer security specialist, has published a comprehensive table showing how long it takes to hack a password. In this table you can see that the length of the key totally impacts the time it takes to hack it.

Each line shows the number of characters these passwords have. Likewise, the columns indicate what type of characters it is composed of. Understand better:

Numeric passwords of 4 to 10 characters: can be hacked in less than 1 second;
Numeric passwords of 11 to 18 characters: it takes from 2 seconds to 9 months to hack them;
Passwords with lowercase letters of 4 to 10 characters: the time needed to hack them varies from 1 second to 58 minutes;
Passwords with lowercase letters of 11 to 18 characters: take from 1 day to 23 million years to be hacked;
Passwords with lowercase and uppercase letters of 4 to 10 characters: time varies from 1 second to 1 month;
Passwords with lowercase and uppercase letters of 11 to 18 characters: hacking these types of passwords takes 5 to 6 billion years;
Passwords with numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters of 4 to 10 characters: the time to hack them varies from 1 second to 7 months;
Passwords with numbers, lowercase and capital letters of 11 to 18 characters: hacking them takes 41 to 100 billion years;
Passwords with numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters and symbols of 4 to 10 characters: it takes from 1 second to 5 years to hack them;
Passwords with numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters and symbols of 11 to 18 characters: hacking them takes from 34 thousand years to 4 billion years.

In short, passwords created from numbers are the easiest to hack. When symbols, letters and length (more than 10 characters) are added to a password, it is practically impossible.