Anatomy of a brute force attack - how important is password complexity?

You may have heard of the curate's egg.

It comes from a wry Punch cartoon from the late nineteenth century in which a curate (a junior cleric) is having breakfast with with the Bishop (a senior cleric), when the latter offers an apology, saying, "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones."

Determined to salvage the situation by finding someting positive to say, the curate replies, "I assure you that parts of it are excellent." And it was in that vein that my friend, colleague and popular (though sadly only occasional) Naked Security writer,Ross McKerchar, waved in front of me a recent article on password security.

It was published on Redmondmag, a indepdent website about Windows that is well-read and reasonably influential, and it attempted to answer the question, "How Important Is Password Complexity?"

Password Complexity

The good part of this curate's egg is that the author, Brien Posey, took a hands-on approach, and came up with a realistic Spy-vs-Spy password recovery scenario.

Anatomy of a brute force attack - how important is password complexity? | The Naked Security