[playbox12]

Just adding to the bruteforce takes weeks or months. If you have a large hash dump file and some decent rules for your brutefroce attack you can very quickly crack passwords by running it on your GPU. (we are talking billions of passwords per second). Now imagine multiple GPU's or multiple PC's (even clusters of servers, there are websites where you can rent some processing power to crack hashes).

Now we are not even talking about dictionary attacks or Markov, hybrid combinations and so on.

Password security is essential.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ords-hour.html
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/06/25-gp...our-passwords/