ok 1st of all, OP said years ago.. so 3090's were not out years ago. and as for cracking passwords, i dont do that, but using ETHhash the 3090 hashes out around 120 MH/s 3080 100, 3070 60, I was just proving a point its not gonna happen in a few days.. even at 1 gh/s
I assumed you didn't crack passwords since someone referred to use as "crypto". I assumed you were a miner, and would at least have some sense of what I would be referring to and why I chose to reply to you in the first place (as opposed to some clown who is regurgitating what the IT guy at his office told him, I generally just flat ignore them). Side note - question why not AMD cards? Has NVIDIA actually added hardware hashing of MD5/SHA and closed the performance gap?
But back to my point... The fact of the matter is that a 12 character password can be broken today in minutes (actually a 14 character one can be done in 6 minutes, as referenced) and yes, 2 years ago they could be broken in days (you might also note the "depending upon your use case" in my original post).
Basically I'm saying people shouldn't be spreading the false idea that their 12 character passwords are "safe", they are not. Adding "special characters" does nothing to make it more "secure" - i.e. no one writes a cracking algorithm that doesn't enumerate special characters. One last thing to point out, mathematically speaking, only the worst case scenario would require full enumeration (i.e. that it takes to the last guess to break it is as equally probable as it being the first guess).
But all of this is a semantic argument in the first place, the idea that anyone is going to target any of us with a high end hashbox is close to zero (unless one of you is some high profile individual that I don't know about).
Other fun facts:
DES and TDES have been broken and AES 64 is breakable.
AES 256 is the current MIN recommended encryption (with some saying AES1K or AES2K is the way to go).
And don't forget, quantum computing could make factoring large primes easy (for those who don't know, that would basically unlock the entire internet). I think Intell is up to 50 (maybe more) QBITS these days.