On Wed, 2015-02-04 at 14:16 -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
Oh, and the program to do this can be found very easily. It's called 'John the Ripper' and has GPU support available: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/GPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_ripper
Again, the real bruteforce danger is when your /etc/shadow is exfiltrated by a security vulnerability of the type that allows arbitrary remote code execution or arbitrary file access. Once the attacker has your /etc/shadow, there is absolutely nothing you can do to keep said attacker from cracking your passwords at full speed. Well, nothing except the password strength itself.
Thanks for the future details. My passwords usually contain letters from 2 or 3 different languages as well with non-letters inserted every 2 or 3 characters.