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Xkcd, the popular “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, recently posted a strip about the paradoxical in humans trying to create hard to guess passwords.
Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.
The comic even resulted in a Simple Strong Password Generator.
With the Lulzsec recent post of email addresses and passwords, along with all the regular hacking that occurs on a regular basis, it can be really hard to know if your email password has been compromised. Fortunately, Should I Change My Password can help automatically scan a variety of these info leaks to check if your password has been hacked. This way, you only have to change your password if it actually needs to be updated.
Update: Just to be clear, you don’t have to enter your password on the site, just your email.
Analyst Robert Graham of Dark Reading, a website dealing with computer security issues, authored a fascinating report on the recent hacking of the popular website phpbb.com. The hacker published approximately 20,000 passwords from the site. A few of the interesting insights about the passwords:
16% of passwords matched a person’s first name. This includes people choosing their own first names or those of their spouses or children. The most popular first names were Joshua, Thomas, Michael, and Charlie. But I wonder if there is something else going on. Joshua, for example, was also the password to the computer in "Wargames," which almost certainly accounts for it being at top. Variations of the name "Jordan" are popular, which almost certainly refers to "Michael Jordan," a prominent basketball start (such as "jordan23," referring to his jersey number). This makes me wonder how many people use "Michael" as a password to refer to their children compared to sports stars.
14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like "1234," "qwerty," or "asdf." There are a lot of different patterns people choose, like "1qaz2wsx" or "1q2w3e." I spent a while googling "159357," trying to figure out how to categorize it, then realized it was a pattern on the numeric keypad. I suppose whereas "1234" is popular among righthanded people, "159357" will be popular among lefties.
4% are variations of the word "password," such as "passw0rd," "password1," or "passwd." I googled "drowssap," trying to figure out how to categorize it, until I realized it was "password" spelled backward.
For the complete list and analysis, visit link.
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