(CNN) -- Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords. The
12-character era of online security is upon us, according to a
report published this week by the Georgia Institute of
Technology. The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to
crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours. But when
the researchers applied that same processing power to
12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to
make them snap. "The length of your password in some cases can
dictate the vulnerability," said Joshua Davis, a research
scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. It's hard to
say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character
passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior
research scientist who also worked on the project. The
researchers recommend 12-character passwords -- as opposed to
those with 11 or, say, 13 characters -- because that number
strikes a balance between "convenience and security." They
assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to tr