PSA Part 2: Not All Gawker Passwords Were Masterpieces Of Crypto-Intellectual Might
by
Jack Baruth
Published: December 14th, 2010
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The WSJ has come up with a list of the top fifty Gawker passwords. The most common is “1n5i9t7t2f8a6g5m7y5c1t4t2a2o9tc$%”, which is part of the Fibonacci prime sequence interlaced with the first letter of each word of the phrase “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”, ending with two non-letters to slow down brute-force attacks.
Oh, who am I kidding! The most popular password was 123456! Other popular choices: password! qwerty! superman! iloveyou!
Luckily they haven’t figured out my Jalopnik password yet; I know of one fellow who will be personally offended when it’s retrieved.
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Anyone else reminded of that scene from Spaceballs? "One. Two. Three. Four. Five." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K95SXe3pZoY
And here I thought 15 character passwords were a good start. My biggest gripe with many password systems are their restrictions; many of them restrict character entry to a subset of 7-bit ASCII and often certain control characters (including /\*@^ and several others) are excluded from use. It makes the random hash generator useless for 80% of the sites I visit that offer personal account password protection.
They'll never guess my password, Shadowfax. Oh no, I said it out loud!
I used to work in IT (shudder). Jack forgot a few gems: "admin" "user" "" (blank) "pass" - note the clever omission of the word "word" "passwd" - note the clever omission of the letters "or" [username] - the same value that went into the username field (e.g. "dave", "dave") And my all-time fav: "[lastname]1" - the user's last name, with...wait for it...the number "1" diabolically appended to the end! Un-crackable!