why do most passwords requires 6 characters??

Question

most of the websites on the internet ask for a 6 characters password why??

Answer 1

people (hackers) often use a technique known as brute forcing a password to gain access to accounts. passwords under 6 characters can be hacked faster than a password with 6.
the more characters and combination of characters in a password the hard it is.
ie.
passw is a bad password
password is still a bad password but will often be accepted
P4s5w0rD is a much better password as it is more complex

the more interesting you can make a password the better it is
(as far as brute attacks go)

update: don't listen to s3dje having a password that is all numbers is faster to crack than a 3 letter word. I could throw a dictionary attack of 110,000,000 number combinations at a password in a heartbeat.

Answer 2

Ok, lets say that there was no limit and you only used one character. Imagine someone in the same room as you noticed that you only typed one character as your password. There are only 81 possible passwords that you can have based on the keyboard. The person just has to guess at most 81 times and that person is in. Ok, lets say that there are two characters. That means that there are 6561 combinations that the hacker wannabe would have to go thru. Just one extra character pretty much made it incredibly harder for the hacker to figure it out by typing on the keyboard. Six characters gives a whopping total of 282,429,536,481 combinations. That would be impossible for a person at a keyboard to go thru all of the combinations. At one guess per second, the hacker would take almost 9000 years to go thru all of the combinations if he did not stop to eat or sleep. A computer program can brute force attack this amount of combinations, though. Also, since people pretty much use phrases or birthdates or stuff like that, it becomes a little easier if the hacker goes thru those combinations first. However, the longer the password, the more secure the login.

Answer 3

FYI, some encryption methods (standard unix crypt) ignore everything beyond 8 characters... So, your big nasty 14 character passwords could be pointless.

Your best bet is a mix of letters, numbers, and special symbols. Play with a password cracker some time.. they are amazing at breaking dictionary words with small modifications.

Answer 4

6 characters makes the password much more difficult for brute force password cracking - the longer the better - my work passwords are longer then 14 characters

Answer 5

Only because it makes sure that you have more than enough characters to make the password difficult to guess or break. Merely a security standard.

Answer 6

Security. Would you want your password to be just one character?

Answer 7

if it was shorter it would be easier to hack.i know bout this stuff. trust me. stick with a pasword like 8472534957263496. itll work great.