Choosing a Secure Password
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Culture website BoingBoing has published a great article explaining how passwords can get cracked. Lot’s of easy to understand examples and best practices to keep you safe.
A typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. The root isn’t necessarily a dictionary word, but it’s usually something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90% of the time) or a prefix (10% of the time). One cracking program I saw started with a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “temp,” “123456,” and so on. Then it tested them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!,” and so on. It recovered about a quarter of all passwords with just these 100,000 combinations.
Crackers use different dictionaries: English words, names, foreign words, phonetic patterns and so on for roots; two digits, dates, single symbols and so on for appendages. They run the dictionaries with various capitalizations and common substitutions: “$” for “s”, “@” for “a”, “1” for “l” and so on. This guessing strategy quickly breaks about two-thirds of all passwords.
Related Posts:
security alert: Twitter hacked — Twitter announced they had been hacked in a sophisticated attack. Twitter said 250k accounts may be affected and have emailed those users. The stolen data included accounts, emails, addresses, and passwords.
SECURITY: LinkedIn Passwords Compromised — A 6+ million password list has been released to the wild which is strongly suspected to have originated at LinkedIn.
security: breaches remind us to take security seriously — Recently two major corporations have released information about security failures. Estimates of up to 70 million customers personal data stolen by hackers. Starbucks was discovered to have been storing users passwords and information unencrypted in plain text.
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