Help! password

[gvidas]

Not reusing passwords is extremely important.

There isn't an arbitrary length that makes you "safe."

"prohibitively1" is about as hard to crack as "dinosaur1". They're both long English words with a number added. The number of letters isn't very relevant.

The people who do this for fun/profit are savvy to the ways people usually come up with passwords. They're not just writing programs to try "aaa", "aab", etc. They look at the psychology of password-choosing, the recorded history of passwords people use, and (whenever possible) the password criteria of the target website.

Things like the Adobe hack are obviously significant if you had an account with them and are using the same password + email elsewhere. Less obviously, it's significant if you are using the same password that anyone who had an account with Adobe used, regardless of the email address: all of those passwords are all now in dictionaries of known passwords.

Here's a great article on the topic: Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like "qeadzcwrsfxv1331"