The strength of a password is determined by the number of characters that are allowed to be used and its length. This is important to know because if someone is trying to bruteforce a password, their program will try every possible combination of characters. The number of possible combinations can be determined by multiplying the number of characters allowed by itself for each position in the password. For example, a password that uses only lowercase letters and has 5 positions (it is 5 characters long) can have 26x26x26x26x26, or 26^5, possible combinations.

A real password cracking tool is capable of making guesses at rates of 10,000 per second and higher (some up to well over a million guesses a second). If we use the same password from the previous question (only lowercase letters and digits and five characters long), how long would it take to crack it at 10,000 combinations/second? (Use only a, b, c, or d as answer)

a. probably like one second b. 600 seconds, or about 10 minutes c. 60400 minutes, or about 1000 hours d. 6047 seconds, or about 100 minutes