Very often, you are forced to use special characters, numbers, and uppercase and lowercase letters in a password. How Are Passwords Cracked?

They don't magically make your password harder to guess by a computer program The use of numbers and special characters in passwords is more of a psychological thing, than an actual security thing.

Burr recommended creating passwords that were essentially weird nonsense words, chock-full of special characters and occasional capital letters and numbers.

And special characters? Frequently exclamation marks. CMU's password meter will offer advice for strengthening a password like "ILoveYou2!" -- which meets the standard requirements.

A simple eight-character password can be cracked in only 37 seconds using brute force but it takes over a century to crack a 16-character one.