Members shall be advised that their password shall meet minimum requirements for strength.
We have noticed that hackers have been trying to break into our member's accounts.It would not hurt that you changed your passwords now! Especially some older members may be using passwords of insufficient strength. Don't use a password that you use on some other site; don't use your girlfriend's name, your phone number,......
Some passwords shorter than 8 characters can be broken as quickly as few minutes.
NIST recommends 80-bits entropy for the most secure passwords. Personally, I would recommend password lengths of 10 characters minimum and best if longer than 16.
Character set Example Length Entropy Time to Crack
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All printable ASCII meNp0/^EZ':zt/J4 16 104 bits 127 trillion years
Upper & lower case + numerals 53mLDcjFPqudfUmf 16 95 bits 6 trillion years
Hexadecimal 5ce1543ec22d43c5 16 82 bits 1 billion years
Only A-Z QEKFLSKZBEEXJHES 16 75 bits 5 million years
Only numerals 7680572112805159 16 52 bits 1 year
Length Example Entropy Time to Crack
-------------------------------------------------------
4 gZi; 24 bits 0.029246464 seconds
5 H~]DF 28 bits 0.360896796 seconds
6 .CRXfy 37 bits 1 minute
7 <pB/`Be 43 bits 1 hour
8 {5j$zpqE 51 bits 46 days
9 bh}m^LJk] 56 bits 2 years
10 uMNl!6^MI6 64 bits 713 years
11 HB?6G"B<EDr 71 bits 53 thousand years
12 h%Z"$w,<T]@P 76 bits 720 thousand years
13 <[~/oboD'$%}+ 82 bits 46 million years
14 `_%2aD[e=D5"4i 91 bits 22 billion yearsWhat is ENTROPY? To put it simply, 1 bit of improvement means 2x harder to crack! 3 bits is 8x harder. The function is exponential. In the above example, the difference between 104 bits and 52 bits is improvement of
4,503,599,627,370,496 times harder to crack!
Secure passwords are best when generated randomly. Human-chosen passwords are
far less secure (i.e. have lower entropy). Useful random password generator can be found here:
https://convertcalculate.com/strings/random-string.htmlFor further reading, refer to
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Password_strength .
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