| ??? 03/21/08 05:52 Read: times |
#152409 - How secure are ZIP passwords? Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Ap said:
Online backup may not be secure. Craig said:
That's what I was concerned about and why I haven't done it yet. But any serious online backup service offers strong encryption and only the user has the passphrase to unlock the data. Given that, the online services are actually more secure than my hard drive backups since my hard drive backups are unencrypted (which is something else I want to look at remedying, but I'm not sure how much of a performance hit my laptop will take if I encrypt the entire hard drive and external drives). I've always kept my backups in ZIP files with nice, long, random passwords on them that contain a wild assortment of letters and numbers and symbols. My understanding is that it takes so long to crack such a password that doing so can be considered virtually impossible. But the other day one of my buddies opined that a properly motivated individual could crack a ZIP password "in a second". Does anybody know if that's really true? If somebody got access to my backup files, could they really unzip them that easily? -- Russ |
