Forgotten your password? Don't worry - a hacker will find it for you

Life doesn’t half get complicated, doesn’t it? The average adult head is now constantly buzzing with the mixture of upper and lower case characters (plus numbers and symbols) required for our numerous internet passwords. Add to these our PIN numbers and it’s easy to see why 30 per cent of people regularly forget their passwords and around a quarter of us forget our log-in names after a week. So why do firms make them increasingly difficult for us to remember? Is it really necessary to confound us by asking for a mixture of letters, numbers, symbols etc?
Actually it is. A hacker using an average computer can crack a four-number PIN virtually instantaneously and a six-letter password in just 8.5 hours. So what about an eight-character password using a mixture of numbers, symbols and upper and lower-case letters? OK so these are harder to remember, but the good news is that there are a staggering 2.9 quadrillion permutations and will take the average computer around 9,488 years to crack. The bad news is that a supercomputer will still guess your password in just 346 days. So change it every year and you should be OK.
Unfortunately we humans are simple creatures and we all come up with the same passwords. Here are the most popular:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password
9. blink182
10.(your first name)

So. Computers pretty clever, humans really, really stupid. Time for another video to illustrate this I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64&feature=related