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Have you ever wondered how long it would take the typical PC to break your password?  Well, one company, Small Hadron Collider, a teeny-tiny web-design company based in Sheffield, decided to find out and offered up this tool and explanation as to how it works.

Visit http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Note: the results that you are seeing here are based on the simplest ‘brute force’ attempt using a PC (no time delay between attempts).  As more significant computing power is available thought a number of sources including cloud based computing, that resulting number of years could be significantly smaller.  The article continues to offer up alternate techniques that people might use including dictionary attacks, etc.

I would surmise that a small delay of time in the validation of any password would ultimately increase the time it would take and thusly, time-delays of even a few seconds, which is incidental for human use, would bring such technique to it’s knees.

Bottom line – when choosing a password, PLEASE do not use words in the dictionary, proper names, etc.  If you want to generate something safe, consider using 10+ characters and include punctuations.  One good site that will enable you to choose a password is: PCTools Secure Password Generator.  If you include even more characters in your password, you’ll gain stronger results.