Internet Safety · Tool

Would your password survive?

Type a password like the ones you use (please not your real one). Watch how a cracking computer takes it apart, and how long it would last if a website you use got hacked.

Or try:
How a cracker sees it
If a website you use is hacked, this password lasts
Stolen database, powerful computer10 billion guesses a second
Guessing on a login pageabout 10 guesses a second

What gave it away

    Length beats complexity

    Symbols and swapped letters fool people, not computers. A few random words beat them easily.

    How a leak check works without seeing your password

    Password managers and browsers check if your password appeared in a breach, without ever sending it. Step through how.

    Your phone

    Breach list server

    Real leak checkers ask the Have I Been Pwned list of more than a billion leaked passwords in exactly this way. This demo sends nothing.

    What to do

    Use a passphrase

    Four to six random words is long, strong and easy to remember.

    Never reuse

    When one site leaks, criminals try the same email and password everywhere else.

    Let a manager remember

    A password manager creates and fills a different strong password for every site.

    Turn on two-step login

    Even if your password leaks, a code on your phone or UAE PASS keeps the door shut.

    Times are rough estimates. Real attackers use huge lists of leaked passwords and common patterns, so a password that looks random to you may not be.

    Sources and model: the times come from this page's own simple model, not from a real attack. Each password gets a guessing difficulty in bits. Passwords on a short list of the most leaked ones fall almost at once. A dictionary word counts about 11 bits (a list of a couple of thousand words), a year about 6.6 bits, a sequence 5 bits, and any other character by the size of the character set used. In a passphrase each word counts 12.9 bits, like a word picked with dice from the EFF long wordlist of 7,776 words. The time shown is the average to find it: half of all possible guesses, divided by the guessing speed. "Stolen database" assumes 10 billion guesses a second. hashcat benchmarks show one high-end graphics card making far more guesses than that against weakly stored passwords (over 200 billion a second for MD5), and far fewer against slow storage such as bcrypt (a few hundred thousand a second). The Hive Systems Password Table 2026 assumes bcrypt. "Login page" assumes about 10 guesses a second with no limit. NIST SP 800-63B requires websites to limit failed attempts, so real guessing on a login page is usually much slower. Advice: UK NCSC "three random words"; NIST SP 800-63B (length matters more than complexity, and new passwords should be checked against breach lists). Have I Been Pwned, Pwned Passwords: the range search shown above, where only the first 5 characters of the SHA-1 hash are sent.