You may already seen the Password Table that has been in the news lately. If not, it’s a data chart put out by Hive Systems; it updates their data from 2020 that shows how long it would take your password to get hacked under brute force.
If a password is set of 8 characters, using the NIST recommendation of choosing a randomly generated string of 8-characters, using a top-of-a-range GPU that was available in 2018 (RTX 2080) it would take 4 hours to crack a password with numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and symbols. Today, using the latest GPUs (RTX 4090) it takes just 59 minutes, but if cloud resources were used, the time taken to crack the password drops to just 19 minutes if using 8 x A100 GPUs from Amazon AWS, and 12 minutes if using 12.
While the researchers could not test the resources that were available to train ChatGPT, they were able to infer how long it would take using the 10,000 A100 GPUs that were used to train ChatGPT and worked out it would take around 1 second to crack the password. Fortunately, even the most well-resourced hacker would be unlikely to use that number of GPUs to guess your password. The table below shows how long it would take a hacker using standard equipment to guess a password and clearly shows why password length and complexity matter. Of course, if your password is disclosed to someone in a phishing attack, it doesn’t matter how complex your password is and your account can be accessed so in addition to setting a strong password, make sure you also set up multi-factor authentication and, ideally, hardware-based multi-factor authentication.
I was pleased to see that my usually password system has been doing me good. I have been using a minimum of 14 character, number, symbol combinations for a while. Also, I find multi-factor authentication pretty common nowadays.
But the bigger conversation is about the advance in computing power and its integration with ChatGPT. As they discuss below, “are we approaching such high powered computers in the traditional computing space, that are we starting to get closer and closer to the quantum future that we are worried about? ”
You’ve seen it all over the internet, in the news, at universities, and shared within thousands of organizations worldwide: it’s the 2023 Hive Systems Password Table. It’s a great conversation starter about cybersecurity best practices and there’s a lot of layers behind this eye-catching table.
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