Comment by mwytock

I dont understand. If you can use mixed-cased, letters and symbols you have 26 * 2 + 20 = 72 possible characters.

72^8 >> 1e9

It would still take more than 8 days to brute force at 1 billion/sec. And using a longer password (16 chars?) would make this a very long time.

Or is there other trick that makes this fast? Or, is it simply that people don't choose random, long passwords?