Most people feel their passwords are relatively safe; after all, they are at least six characters long, probably with some numbers and special characters thrown in for good measure. For a long time, this was actually true, as the computing power required to crack such passwords was either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Well, not any longer. The art of password cracking has advanced more in the last five years than in the last five decades combined. In my last post, I talked about how bitcoin miners use very fast processors such as GPUs and ASICs to handle the billions of calculations required. Password cracking is a similar pursuit.
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