The writer Mark Burnett has just published a book called, "Perfect Password," in which he claims that 98.8% of all computer users share the same 10,000 passwords.
The Top 5 most popular passwords in existence at the moment are apparently:
1. password
2.123456
3.12345678
4.1234
5.pussy
No, really. The fifth most popular password is pussy, how bizarre is that. If you log onto this site you can see how secure your password is. Mine apparently couldn't be hacked for 21,000 years, not even by somebody employed by a certain well known news organisation.
Back in the old days of Windows 95 passwords had to be changed every ninety days at work, and some people not realising that you could of course return to your original password (meaning you only needed two) would think of all sorts of weird and wonderful combinations. My favourite example of how not to use a password, and it has echoes of the scene in Wargames where Matthew Broderick pulls out the desk drawer in his High School and gains access to the school passwords, was a fellow employee who proudly displayed her password on a yellow post-it note stuck in the corner of her screen.
6 comments:
Mind games, when I clicked on the link I read "How secure is your pussy"!!
...not sure how you get 21,000 years unless punctuation/symbols are allowed (in fact punctuation is obligatory, along with numbers and capitals, in my US government access password ..that's got you wondering hasn't it!)
P.S. I'm sure you've mentioned Wargames at least once or twice before...obviously had a profound effect on you! me too as I can remember seeing it in the summer of '83 in the US, New Ulm, Minnesota, had a great burger for lunch (as I recall, US burgers being so much better than most) whilst visiting family on a short break from my time living in Canada!..not that it sticks in my mind or anything...ahem.
The trouble is that there is a tendency for the more secure passwords to be less memorable so people who choose easy-to-remember passwords maybe don't know they're exposing themselves to greater risk.
(I knew that studying combinatorics would come in handy one day! :-) )
not sure how you get 21,000 years unless punctuation/symbols are allowed"
Think that old ruse will work ha! You won't get it out of me that way.
Re Wargames, I think it's a bit like Back to the Future for me, that guilty pleasure that's a boy thing.
Shy - combinatorics sounds mighty impressive whatever it is.
It's a function of three paramaters:-
1) The length of the password
2) The number of characters allowed
3) The speed at which a "password recovery" program can generate passwords.
Oops...combinatorics is just a posh name for working out how many things are possible in a given situation.
E.g. How many different passwords can you have if your password can only have capital letters and be 10 characters long etc, etc.
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