As huge as this number is, it’s nothing if you’re talking about brute forcing an AIM password. With AIM, you have 4-16 character case sensitive passwords. The vast majority of users will only use a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and space in their passwords, so let’s calculate that first. 63 characters in a 4-16 range,

16
å  63^x = 62,574,537,913,733,490,154,880,900,481- 62.5 octillion.
n=4

That would take about 19,842,255,807,247,000,000 years to crack at 100/second.

It doesn’t stop there. AIM allows more than just your standard alphanumerics. Most people don’t use other characters, but some do. The standard character table understood by AOL’s applications is 255 characters. 4-16 characters in length with a field of 255 characters? Damn.

16
å  255^x = 320,884,951,674,586,670,638,888,924,819,449,050,625
n=4

The name for that number is 320.88 undecillion[3]. Still cracking at 100 tries per second? 101,751,950,683,220,000,000,000,000 (101.75 septillion) millennia to crack every POSSIBLE AIM PASSWORD WITH 100 TRIES PER SECOND.

Fortunately, for those heathens out there still cracking passwords, a lot users don’t use good passwords. People choosing bad passwords is the only reason cracking even works. There are only about 114,000 words in the English language… the vocabulary of most people is around 7,000-8,000. About 50,000 likely passwords… considering reversals, common mixes with numbers, names, sports teams… etc. At the rate we’ve been using, it would take far less than an hour.

Most screen names that are stolen are not cracked. Very rarely are cracks actually effective. Knowing the magnitude of the numbers presented here makes the notion of brute forcing an screen name risible.

Not only would it take longer than this planet has existed, to store a list of those passwords would require massive amounts of data storage. We’ll use the formula 36^x*x. Each character is one byte; so multiply the number of words for the given length by that length to get the number of bytes… as in 36^4 is 1,679,616, the number of possible 4 character passwords… 1,679,616 times 4 bytes each.

16
å  ((36^x)*x) = 130,742,935,654,335,813,385,574,400 bytes; 108.148 YB[4],[5]
n=4

and,

16
å  ((255^x)*x) = 5,132,895,900,211,990,719,707,896,462,761,718,346,250
n=4

5.133 duodecillion bytes… 4,245,831,974,908,300 YB.

To summarize this entire essay, it is quite impossible to brute force the password word to someone else’s screen name. Hopefully, if you still try to crack screen names, you’ll grow out of it, or for God’s sake at least rely on Trojans and exploits rather than any kind of cracking.