Safety In Numbers: Why you should be using a number in passwords

Every day I use passwords to access a host of important information: email passwords, bank account PIN, phone keylocks. And it's important that the passwords we use are of a high integrity, so we need to make sure we choose our passwords wisely.
But it's amazing to think that by even making a small change can make a big difference to your password's integrity.

Okay, lets assume right now you have a 6 character password, where each character is made up from one letter of the alphabet (the password is non-case sensitive). There are 26 possible characters for each position. Hence

26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 = 308,915,776 possible passwords

Wow, so around 309 million possible phrases. Let's say you changed this password by adding in a number somewhere. So, now there are 7 characters, where each character is either a letter from the alphabet or a number between 0-9. There are 36 possible characters for each position.

36 x 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 = 78 364 164 096 possible passwords!

So, by simply adding in a number into a password it is now 250 times stronger.