system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: If my password can be cracked in X years, is that the minimum, maximum, average... Or something else?

Could the cracking computer "get lucky" and find my password much quicker than the estimate?

Ie if they say an 18 character password will take 2 million years to crack ... Could it actually be cracked ANY time between now and then? Or only after two million years has passed?
gpt
of course it can.

this is always "worst case" aka maximum.


say your password is "aaaaaaaa" and the computer starts by doing a stupid bruteforce-attack where it just tries everything starting with exactly that (no one does that, pw-cracking is much smarter than this).