Note that password cracking systems are rated on the number of password guesses they make per second. Stock laptop computers without high-end graphics cards or any other optimizations can guess 2500 passwords/second. More powerful desktop computers can test over a hundred million each second, and with graphics cards (GPUs) that rises to billions of passwords per second. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking). This website has a good explanation about how improving the complexity of a password affects how easy it is to break: http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi, but is using very out of date numbers - consider a basic laptop able to produce "Class E" attacks, and a desktop, "Class F" http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php http://cyber-defense.sans.org/blog/downloads/ has a calculator buried in the zip file "scripts.zip" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2331984/Think-strong-password-Hackerscrack-16-character-passwords-hour.html https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm https://www.owasp.org/images/a/af/2011-Supercharged-Slides-Redman-OWASP-Feb.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/magazine/the-secret-life-of-passwords.html?_r=1 Recommendation Materials that may be useful PASSWORD SURVEY How many passwords do you have to remember for accounts and devices used to do your work? [ ] No [ ] Yes If you tried to login to your computer account right now, how many attempts do you think it would take? [ ] No Page 86 of 240