How Long Does It Take for a Hacker to Get Your Password?

How Long Does It Take for a Hacker to Get Your Password?
The short answer: it depends, but very quickly if your password is weak.

– If your password is eight characters long and all lower-case, like “password,” it would take a hacker 3.5 minutes to guess it.

– Changing one of those lowercase characters to an uppercase character, like “Password,” means it would take him almost 15 hours.

– Replacing any letter with a special character and keeping the uppercase character, like “P@ssword,” means it would take the hacker 70 days to guess your password.

– If you added a single character to “P@ssword” to form “P@ssword1” it would take the hacker 18 years to guess the password.

– If you added two characters to “P@ssword,” to form “P@ssword11” it would take the hacker 1,707 years to guess the password.

So on and so forth until you arrive at some astronomical numbers. See the table below:
https://www.carbonblack.com/2016/09/07/dont-be-cracked-the-math-behind-good-online-passwords/

Plan B wrote:How Long Does It Take for a Hacker to Get Your Password?

Much less time than even this.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-RbOKanYs from Computerphile.

Please keep in mind that hackers are not interested in plebs like us. They want to go after big fish or big email lists. You've heard of the hacks at the various large companies, like DHL and Target stores. What you may not know is the billions of hacks on Yahoo email... but not on your email. On the company servers, to get at everyone's emails. And do they steal your money? No. They want your address so they can resell it to teams that send out millions of spam emails. Having a really good password in these cases makes no difference at all.

I might add, hackers don't "guess" passwords. They don't have the time or the interest. If they have to unlock a password, they use sophisticated algorithmic programming on high-end computers.

The only guy who really needs to be careful with his password around here is the one who wants to make sure his wife doesn't know about his favourite porn sites.