Your iPhone password can be hacked in 18 minutes and other surprising cybersecurity facts

This year's Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas offered up a shocking, quirky and often downright strange view of the security space.

Hacking your iPhone's defenses
Hacking your iPhone's defenses

A "brute force" attack on an iPhone can cycle through nine password guesses per second, according to Dino Dai Zovi, an independent security consultant and notorious Apple hacker.

Which means...

-A password made up of 4 numeric characters would take 18 minutes to hack

-Alphanumeric characters are trickier. A password with 4 of them would take 51 hours to break.

-5 alphanumeric characters: 8 years

-8 alphanumeric characters: 13,000 years


By David Goldman - Last updated August 09 2011: 6:59 PM ET
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