How long would it take to crack an 8 digit password?

[dvijaydev46]

Lets say you had a password like: !sY#@uE* which was protecting your data.

How long would it take to crack it just using normal means?

It all depends on the encryption used. For example, an NTLM hash (of an 8 character password with alphanumeric and symbols) can be broken within a day if you have a few 6990s. But AES, as implemented in RAR files, is several hundreds of thousands of times stronger than NTLM and I'm a real skeptic of even using a password cracker to break RAR passwords. Even the most powerful GPUs do just a few thousand combinations which isn't sufficient to break even shorter and simpler passwords.

I need some figures for work.
I work in a Medico Legal department and daily we send out disks to Solicitors containing Medical Records and according to the chart it would take an average computer up to 57 years to find it.
I also send out password protected documents in email and for some reason 'the powers that be' think that it's safer sending in the post than in email
I will be printing out the Password Recovery Speeds page and planting it on a desk.

Thanks

I don't know what kind of documents you send but the security implemented in MS Office 2007 and above is safe enough I think. If you need more, you can password protect the files with Winrar. With a 10 charecter password, it becomes almost impossible to break.

 

[edscdk]

83½ Days minimum according to http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi

AND this is using a supercomputer

actually the minimum would be less than a second, I suspect 83 days is the time to try 50% of the combinations...

 

[PMKeates]

I feel quite comfortable that a 10,000 machine distributed grid is gonna give me over 3 months to change my email password, or a million times the current age of the universe to change my WiFi one.