How to create a 'super password' - CNN.com

How to create a 'super password' - CNN.com (CNN) -- Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords. The 12-character era of online security is upon us, according to areport published this week by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours. But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap. "The length of your password in some cases can dictate the vulnerability," said Joshua Davis, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.