The days of wimpy, eight-letter passwords are now gone.  The 12-character era of online password security has now begun.

The bad news: Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology utilized a cluster of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours.

The good news: The researchers discovered that the same process would take 17,134 years to crack a 12-character password.

The article “How To Create a ‘Super Password’ by CNN’s John D. Sutter, outlines the issue very well and explains the how’s, why’s and what-to-do’s to insure that your online identity is secure as possible behind a good password.