How Long Would it Take to Hack Your Steem Password (Private Key)
The Answer
With all of the recent DDOS attacks and phishing scams going around there's a lot of worry and fear about being hacked.
@samstonehill wrote up a post that outlines his horrible ordeal of late that most of us are aware of.
Fortunately, he was able to recover his account and he actually reached out to the attacker who then made a few more claims about having compromised other accounts.
I just want to make sure that everyone understands that the only way that these hackers can get access to your account is if you give them your key.
They usually will try to do this by getting you to go to a fake website where they then prompt you to input your active or owner key. If you do, it's at this point that your account will be compromised.
The fact of the matter is that the keys to your account are not hackable by modern computers. You probably noticed when you signed up for your Steem account that you couldn't make up your own little password that is easy to remember. You're required to create a long, inmemorable key. This is by design to protect your account.
With our current technology it would literally take in the vicinity of Sexdecillion years to hack just one private key.
Side note, yes Sexdecillion is a real number! To give you some perspective, here's where that number falls when you look at it on a chart. (Hint: It's the last one)
That's pretty much infinity as far as I'm concerned!
If you're interested in seeing this for yourself I invite you to check out this website where you can input a password and it will tell you how long it will take to crack it.
Do not put in your actual password on this site!
The site is just a handy resource that allows you to see how hard it is to crack certain passwords. Go ahead and type in the word "password" or "p@ssw0rd" and you'll get a good idea of just how easy most passwords can be cracked these days and why it's so important to use strong passwords.
Now to give you an example of how hard it is to crack a 21 character password I've taken a screenshot of the result.
and there we have it, we've managed to hit a measly Sextillion years. Nowhere even close to the Sexdecillion years it would take to crack our 51 character Steem keys!
Needless to say, you now know that it's not your account that can be hacked, it's you! That's why hackers are always trying to trick us, fool us, phish us. Simply put, it's far easier to trip us up into giving them our passwords then it is to try to actually crack a strong password. So, stay vigilant and always be alert whenever you're doing anything with your active or owner keys.
If you're interested in seeing how I create my passwords, stay tuned for a follow up post.
Wow, this post is full of helpful information. I'll have to check out that website that tests password strengths. Even though I won't be testing my actual passwords, it would give me an idea of how secure similar passwords are.
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