i think great difficultly can be added to crack a password by adding caps, numbers, characters, and characters that are not on a keyboard. we now would have some 250 characters to use. not hard to use ***, as it is on the num pad. not hard to use €ąŁ as they can be done with an alt key on a MS keyboard. with a mac, one can easily add ➤✺‡ which makes cracking with a machine algorithm really difficult, and take a really long time.

i would presume if one just uses letters, a program could crack a 9 letter code in a matter of minutes.