Password Cracking

Thanks, yes, I still have the same laptop that was used to create the password on the USB drive, and I'll ask someone who understands computerd to have a look at it as you suggest. Again, Thanks for your help.

With all passwords is depends on the complexity to determine how quickly it will be cracked

Mostly people refer to a chart like below for an estimate of how long it will take to break a password

You can see that simple passwords consisting of lowercase letters or numbers are quite easy to crack when the length is short

However a fairly complex password incorporating upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols quickly adds a few million years onto the time

Even a collection of dictionary words can be considered secure as long as they don't form part of a phrase that's vulnerable to a dictionary attack

For example "table pipe yellow badger" is more secure than "a really strong password"

Add uppercase letters, numbers and symbols and you'll have a fairly robust password

"?Table 46 Pipe-Yellow 19 Badger!" should keep a cluster of GPUs cooking for a few thousand years

There's also the value of the information being stolen to consider. I'm hoping no-one here has access to nuclear launch codes so most likely the information in any of our accounts isn't worth the expense of cracking the password

This is why phishing, ransomware and other scams are the more common ways of stealing passwords. They're a lot cheaper to run and can be targeted at a larger audience so are more likely to yield a profit

There was a response earlier that gave a more direct answer, that these software tools were cracking passwords based on a hashed password picked up on wifi, is that correct?

Well that's the problem with analogies isn't it 😉

In the case of a password manager, you have an encrypted copy of all the password files on your devices. The manager just syncs the changes to the file across your devices

You'll have a passphrase which forms part of the key to decrypt the file

They could in theory threaten to revoke access unless you pay them and it is a credible threat if the manager service doesn't disclose the encryption method

I'd wager doing so would cause some negative publicity and a downturn in sales, so unlikely to happen

Personally I use BitWarden partly because it's open source and isn't vulnerable to these types of shenanigans and can be self hosted if desired