Why is a password with both numbers and letters stronger than one with only letters? Attackers will include numbers in their brute force attempts anyway, so how does it make a difference?

Question

Why is a password with both numbers and letters stronger than one with only letters? Attackers will include numbers in their brute force attempts anyway, so how does it make a difference?

In: Technology

Answer 1

A password with letters and numbers in it is harder to brute force because there are more potential solutions to the problem. For example, with a single symbol password that consists of just letters then we have 26 potential passwords. If we change that to letters and numbers then we have 36 potential passwords (26 letters and 10 single digits).