<p>
  Remember security starts at the keyboard in front of you:
</p>

<p>
  A 6 character password has about fifty six billion (56,800,235,584) possibilities and the average computer (the G5 is even faster) can try all combinations (crack them) in 2.5 hours.
</p>

<p>
  A 7 character password has about three and a half trillion (3,521,614,606,208) possibilities and a computer can try all combinations in about 1 week.
</p>

<p>
  An 8 character password has about two hundred trillion (218,340,105,584,896) possibilities and a computer can try all its combinations in about a year.
</p>

<p>
  A 9 character password would take about 70 years for a computer to try all combinations.
</p>

<p>
  They say the chips coming in about a year could half these times! Now if you do not want to wait for next year&#8217;s chip, you can always put 2 computers in parallel and half the time. In theory you could put 365 computers in parallel and break 8 character passwords in just over a day (Virginia Tech just put 1100 G5s in parallel). Do you think hackers have friends?
</p>

<p>
  Computers have a lot more time on their hands than we do and most of the bad guys don&#8217;t have jobs. The next person asking for your social security number could be just a few clicks away from your stock options.
</p>

<p>
  If you just got a chill down your back or just got a little paranoid; good, my work is done.
</p>

<p>
  Use an 8 character password (9 characters is better)&#8230; You would make this security professional very happy if you would change your passwords after you read this e-mail : )
</p>

One nice short story after a long time. You’ve gotta read this.

Here’s a excerpt from the story.

You ever wonder why Google doesn’t cache it’s own searches?

They program around it.

No. That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?

It’s still a part of the internet, though.

No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.

Cool !