How effective are password hack tools?
Richard Brain, our resident application and platform security expert, explains why strengthening a password is so important.
The cracking process also becomes even faster if extensive rainbow tables are used. These tables contain pre-calculated password hash lookups, which can break the encryption used to protect the passwords, and therefore provide a shortcut for those trying to hack them. Thanks to these recent improvements, it is now trivial to crack a password based on a dictionary word or a dictionary word combined with a number.
The best defence against password hack tools is to create a strong password consisting of multiple words, numbers and characters of mixed case. It is also common to find the Leet alphabet (Internet slang, similar to the spellings and abbreviations used in telephone text messages) or password generators, being used to create strong passwords.