A team at the Georgia Tech Research Institute has determined that passwords 7-10 characters in length are woefully inadequate. They recommend that everyone increase their passwords to at least 12 characters comprised of a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters, along with digits and special characters in order to protect from brute-force attacks.
The reason for this being that the processors in widely available and affordable graphics cards have increased in performance at a drastic rate. Modern GPUs contain many pipelines for parallel processing which allows for rapid rendering of millions of vertices dozens of times per second. Someone looking to brute-force your password can harness this cheap, available power to quickly crunch through all possible combinations for 7-10 character passwords.
A2 Hosting has procedures in place to protect you from brute force password attacks on your accounts. But you can never be too sure about password security! Don't risk it. Start updating your passwords now!
