This chart shows how long it would take a computer to hack your exact password

Katharina Buchholz

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This chart shows the time it would take for a computer to crack passwords.

A password of 8 standard letters contains 209 billion possible combinations, but a computer is able to calculate this instantly.

Adding one upper case letter to a password dramatically alters a computer's potential to crack a password, extending it to 22 minutes.

Having a long mix of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers is the best way make your password more secure.

A 12-character password containing at least one upper case letter, one symbol and one number would take 34,000 years for a computer to crack.

Password, 123456, qwerty - while passwords which appear on the list of the most common passwords should definitely be retired from use, even a more unique password can be easy to crack if a computer program is tasked with systematically breaking it.

As seen in data by website Security.org, adding even one upper case letter to a password can already dramatically alter its potential. In the case of an eight-character password, it can now be broken in 22 minutes instead of instantaneously in one second – an increase of more than 1000 percent.

While the added time in this case is definitely not good enough to end up with a satisfactory password, the high security gains of using characters other than lower case letters can be multiplied. When using at least one upper case letter and one number, an eight-character password now would take a computer 1 hour to crack. Add another symbol and it takes eight. To make a password truly secure, even more characters or more than one uppercase letter, number or symbol can be added. A twelve-character password with one uppercase letter, one number and one symbol is almost unbreakable, taking a computer 34,000 years to crack.