Mark Minasi’s latest newsletter talks about a nonillion (and a half) of possibilities if you have a 15-character passphrase of all lowercase letters. Mark has some good ideas, and this one isn’t necessarily a bad one.
But I think he needs help with numbering. A nonillion (in the American system of counting) is actually a 1 folowed by 30 zeros. The number he references, 1,677,259,342,285,725,925,376, only leaves room for 21 zeros, which is actually a sextillion (and a half). Not only more correct, but much more fun to type.
This isn’t really that important. It’s still a pretty big number. And Mark still made the correct calculations. A program trying one million (1,000,000) passwords per second would require nearly 532,000 centuries to try every possibility in that number. That is still a very long time. I just needed to clear this up.