Calculating your password strength is fairly simple mathematically. Take the number of characters to choose from (26 for just lower case letters, 52 for upper and lower case letters, etc) and raise it to the power of the number of characters in your password.
For example PassWord would be 52 ^ 8. And while that generates a lot of characters, with the power and speed of the modern computer, it doesn’t take long to guess every possible combination. A single computer could do it in just 36 days.
However, MyLongPassword would take almost 1,966,558,953 years!
We’ve been conditioned to use complex passwords, which help, but the longer the password, the less likely you are to be randomly hacked. In the video above we look at several example to see how long it would take, showing that a long, but easy to remember password, is usually a better choice for you, especially if you can throw a few upper case characters in there.
Want to test your own password(s) – try out our Password Strength Tester to see how good yours is.