How simply upper-casing your password can frustrate a hacker's attempts at breaking into your account

How simply upper-casing your password can frustrate a hacker's attempts at breaking into your account - Passwords? Pin numbers? There was a time before Internet shopping when they were barely needed.

But their prevalence has, in turn, led to a growth in online accounts being hacked and the need to memorise increasingly unwieldy passwords.

Now, researchers have found that simply by upper-casing your password you can minimise a hacker's chance of breaking into your account.

Moment of truth: Simply by upper-casing your password you can minimise a hacker's chance of breaking into your account

A six-letter password in lower-case text takes a hacker's computer just ten minutes to crack, according to statistics collated by Bloomberg Businessweek.

But make those letters upper-case and it takes ten hours for it to randomly work out your password.

Add numbers and/or symbols to your password and the hacker's computer has to work for 18 days.

Despite widespread warning, 50 per cent of people choose a common word or simple key combination for their password.

The most used passwords are 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty and abc123.

However, the security conscious among you may want to try this - choose a nine letter password that includes numbers and/or symbols as this would take a hacker's computer a staggering 44,530 years to break.

Sometimes though it's not the fault of the individual.

In December, media firm Gawker urged subscribers to change their passwords after its user database was hacked and more than 1.3million passwords were stolen.

The company, which runs a series of irreverent blogs on media and technology, warned that simple passwords could be vulnerable to attacks by hackers' computers.

A file containing the password details was then published on a file-sharing site by a group allied to the notorious image board 4Chan, which has been linked to a series of recent 'Anonymous' attacks on major websites.

Also last month, the Visa and MasterCard sites were inaccessible for a short time because of attacks by supporters of WikiLeaks. ( dailymial.co.uk )

IS YOUR PASSWORD SAFE?

Length - 6 characters

Lower-case: 10 minutes

• + Upper-case: 10 hours
• + Numbers and symbols: 18 days

Length - 7 characters

Lower-case: 4 hours

• + Upper-case: 23 days
• + Numbers and symbols: 4 years

Length - 8 characters

Lower-case: 4 days

• + Upper-case: 3 years
• + Numbers and symbols: 463 years

Length - 9 characters

Lower-case: 4 months

• + Upper-case: 178 years
• + Numbers and symbols: 44,530 years

Data: Gartner, Forrester, Duo Security, Imperva, LastBit Software as collated by Bloomberg Businessweek

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