Quote:
Originally Posted by iadom
I read that they only use 24 of the possible 26 letters which reduces the time to crack by a considerable margin. Mine didn't have 'any' in it anywhere. 
I can also confirm that my daughters wifi password has no similarity to mine whatsoever. |
Don't forget, it's case sensitive, so it's more like 48 letters + numbers. 58 vs 62 possible characters isn't quite a big difference.
Having said that, password length will always trump complexity. While I agree the default passwords on routers are possibly not terribly secure, they should be changed regardless.
If you change it to a password that's 15+ characters long, even purely lower case will be more secure than a "complex" 8 character password.
To give an example, if you have an 8 character password to which any of the 8 characters can be one of 100 possible values (26 lowercase + 26 uppercase + 10 numeric + a bunch of symbols, punctuation, spaces, etc.), you'd get 10,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities.
Whereas if you have a 15 character long password of
just lower case letters, it's 1,677,259,342,285,725,925,376 possible combinations. Length really does trump complexity.
10,000,000,000,000,000
vs
1,677,259,342,285,725,925,376
Use a passphrase of uppercase and lowercase letters with some punctuation thrown in and nothing will ever brute force it, even with dictionary attacks.