Whitepaper | Does Password Length Really Matter?

While there are many new safeguards designed to prevent password guessing, the length, complexity and uniqueness of a password are still important factors to make an account secure.

Computer programs designed to guess passwords work by harnessing new technologies to make millions of guesses per second. The longer and more complex a password the more guesses are required before the correct combination is found.

Modern password guessing programs will also try dictionary words, common variations and commonly used passwords, which makes unique passwords important.

Many safeguards have been developed to protect against these guessing methods and are often extremely effective where they are implemented.

In some cases, systems may only allow three incorrect login attempts, or there may be inherent limitations, such as bandwidth and processing power, that stop multiple login attempts.

Additionally, new cryptographic storage techniques are making it harder for attackers to guess passwords, even in ‘offline’ attempts.

Unfortunately, while these safeguards are very effective when implemented, they are not implemented universally, and are not completely full proof.

Individuals should never rely on security features which may or may not be present.

It is for this reason that making passwords long (lots of characters), strong (using lower case, upper case, special characters, and numbers) and unique (only used for one system/login) is still an important baseline for personal security.

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