Slashdot Mirror
Analyzing 20,000 MySpace Passwords
Rub3X writes "Author found 20 thousand MySpace passwords on a phishing site and did some tests on them. They were tested for strength, length and a number of other things. Also tested was the most popular password, and the most popular email service used when registering for myspace."
Slashdotted before we even being. CPU quota exceeded.
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
Site seems dead for know, but the Coral Cache got the text atleast.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
spent some of that time analyzing the strength of his hosting plan
[place
Most common passwords used:
13 - cookie123
12 - iloveyou
12 - password
11 - abc123
11 - fuckyou
11 - miss4you
Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
Mirrordot http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/65dbc3fb38c8508be da018cb179a7607/index.html
It's a fairly interesting (if not too detailed) analysis. A commenter makes a critical observation, though: these were passwords entered at the phishing site, not MySpace. As such, some people can easily recognize it's not the original site and add such gems as "fuckyou".
Personally, I try to fit the following in every eBay phishing page I see:
Field 1: "just who do you think you're kidding?"
Field 2: "better luck next time, dolt."
Say, 10% of passwords contained on a site was obtained using a dictionary attack. Then perform analysis on these password. Conclusion that basing on statistically significant number of passwords (10%, >10000) almost 100% of passwords on the site are vulnerable to dictionary attack is simply wrong - the sample was biased.
Similar about phishing-originated passwords. Phishing is a result of bad practices on user side, and usually clicking attachments in spam, using insecure browser and no antivirus is connected with using poor quality passwords. The results WILL show worse quality of user passwords than real simply because the passwords originate from subset of users who know less of security in general (and as result, got hacked.)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The analysis is flawed as a general indicator of MySpace passwords because it is only a subset of people who would actually fall for phishing attacks. Of course such people will have horrible password habits
Now, I am changing my password to cookie321, no one will see that coming.
It would be interesting to see how many of the names in that list use the same password for MySpace account as they do in their email account.
http://www.networkmirror.com/pMNGiaubQFpIgJLX/cybe r-knowledge.net/blog/2006/09/16/analyzing-20000-my space-passwords/index.html
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/65dbc3fb38c8508be da018cb179a7607/index.html
I have a few "sets" of passwords that I use. Basically it goes like this:
;)
1) Online banking - Very complex ( as complex as my banking site will allow that is ) / Important work related passwords
2) Unimportant work related passwords (Such as the log in to view the cacti graphs for example) / Public websites that require a password and I care a little bit about
3) Public websites I could give a rats ass about having broken into. Myspace would be listed here. So would my slashdot account.
So my point is just because people use crappy passwords for myspace doesn't nesasarily mean they don't have a clue......but being caught by phishers does.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Sorry, you have to have a six digit UID to know what phishing means.
"Really, it should read: the most commonly used passwords, by MySpace users who were targeted by and fell for a phisher" - or by people pretending to be MySpace users when targeted by a phisher - or by people giving a bogus password when targeted by a phisher.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Due diligence would have him write a script to check which user/pass combinations were valid, and then analyze only those.
meh
I think you should take the same advise. I just stole your account and now I'm posting as you Mr. Coward.....HAHAHAHA!
There are publicly-available tools to prevent weak passwords from being used in the first place. OpenBSD has something, and I've compiled the library below and used it to protect ancient Oracle 7 accounts on HP-UX 10.20.
There are a lot of people who don't know or don't care..... If you open a website with registration with asking e-mail and new password. Thousands of people will give you their e-mail and they will pick the same password for your website as their e-mail password. :)
I almost sense a disappointment that MySpace users didn't come out looking stupider. Give the MySpace users a break! Their computer illiteracy is made painfully clear, but imagine if Slashdot had a comparable way to highlight its posters social illiteracy. Perhaps there would be MySpacers writing on message boards about how stupid all Slashdot users were for their poor fashion sense. Yes, that would be stupid, but comparably as stupid as the blind, generalizing hate for MySpace users that is prevalent here.
1. Put up a site that claims to have tens of thousands of passwords up.
2. Post news on Slashdot.
3. Users go to site, and SEARCH for their password. Hacker now has REAL passwords thanks to the searches.
There was an MIT study claiming that the strength of passwords was affected by length alone. Because of brute force cracking, the longer the password, the longer it took to break. Consider the three character password where I allowed only numbers, and upper and lower case letters. Each position in the password would have 10 + 26 + 26 = 62 possibilities. A three letter password would have 62 * 62 * 62 combinations. Now, if I required "strength" by requiring the use of a letter, and both upper and lower case, I now have only 10 * 26 * 26 combinations. Requiring "strength" always reduces the set of possible combinations for the password.
At the bottom of his article it has an add for:
'Need a cheap host that can survive the Digg effect?'
That links to his webhost... Guess it doesn't survive it very well, eh?
Recently while auditing user accounts this password turned up as one of the top 10 most common passwords - if you don't know, it's Fox Mulder's password in the X-Files. Passwords used in movies and tv are surprisingly common, 'joshua' is pretty common, and quite a few people use 'CPE1704TKS' proving that just because people remember detailed trivia from hacking movies they don't know what makes a good password.
Twenty-two years on, here's my obvous password detector. This is C source code I wrote in 1984. This simple piece of code will prevent the use of passwords that are English words, by requiring that the password have at least two sequences of three letters not found in the dictionary. The "dictionary" is compressed down to a big table of hex constants; it's a 27x27x27 array of bool, with a 1 for each triplet found in the UNIX dictionary. So the code is simple, self-contained, and does no I/O.
Put this in your password-change program and dictionary attacks stop working.
The code is a bit dated; this is original K&R C, not ANSI C.
I should do a Javascript version and give that out. The code is so small that it could easily be executed on user-side password pages.
When I'm bored, I look through my spam folder, and put fake data on the phishing websites. Is there any kind of program that automatically does it? Remember Blue Frog? What if there was a program that did the same for phishing websites.
IMHO grupus.com sucks.
It seems pretty obvious to me, the "fuckyou" password people KNEW about the phishing attempt, and thats why they typed in "fuckyou"
If I ever encounter anything like that, that looks a little phishy, you always test the waters by sending a fake "fuckyou" password through and seeing what happens..
but yours is eight...
Most interesting to me is that despite most of the passwords being decent it makes not a lick of difference in these people being phished. Once again, being sharp and understanding of the big picture is more important than following any isolated rule about security. Good luck getting that out to the masses, though :)
Cheers.
i remember when somebody on the ytmnd irc channel passed out a list of 45 thousand myspace accounts+passwords
The author is saying that a 20 character all lower-case password is no better than a 5 character password that has both upper and lower case characters. That is just plain wrong.
What other significant fallacies are there in the article?
He have "found" 20,000 passwords and wanted to help the people to choose better ones?
I envy him.
I wanted to be a guy like him.
He's my idol.
I use the same password for all 25 of my MySpace accounts whether it is one of my teen male accounts, my horny 18 year female accounts, or one of my faux celebrity pages, so don't be surprised if "teenlover" scores high on password frequency...
Really? Does password strength on a myspace account actually matter? Do we even know how Myspace stores passwords, and if it uses a hash?
What i'm trying to say is, there are 4 ways to get somebody's password. 1: Physically (wether they wrote it down or torture), 2: guessing, 3: phishing, or 4: cracking. 1 and 3 don't matter how complex your password is, and 2 is impossible if your password is even reletivly complex. So let's examine 4, cracking the hash. Of course, they would need to obtain the hash, so they would have to crack/break into the Myspace servers. Of course, when they're there, they would be idiots if they only stole one password, as it would be a waste of time/money/psuedo criminal behavior. So, crackers steal say, 8 billion myspace accounts (roughly 1/2 of the myspace community). What happens? We get a digg/slashdot story telling us of this, you go change your password, and everyone's happy. Oh, and cracking thousands of 6 character lower case/numeric passwords would still take a fucking eternity.
I moved back home to a small country after living abroad for a few years. One of the first things I did was to fix my Internet bank (I had one which I had never used). So I went to the bank to fix the password and the banker asked me to give tell her the password so she could fill in a form. At this point my alarm went off but she told me this was the only way and I could always change it after I logged in so I played along. So I started telling her some default password (note: this is not my password - nice try) Me: "Capital 'A' ..."
Banker: "You should probably know that the passwords aren't case sensitive."
Me (thinking): What? Note to self... complain! until then use special characters!"
Me: "All right then... 'a' '/'"
"Banker: Sorry we can't use special characters."
I became so angry. Now I won't tell you which bank it is (don't want you hacking into my account). But I complained and now they provide a service which sends a five digit number to my mobile phone but I am still angry with the bank (which ironically is now the best security provided by a bank in my country).
My point is: It's not always with the users, it may be with the designers where the problem lies!
Is *******. That way I can always see what I'm typing.
He came up with a rating scheme from 1 to 4, where 4 is the "best" password. And he says "I consider strength two fine for a myspace account." Very good point: Not all websites need the same level of password strength.
My personal pet peeve is websites that probably only require a 2 or 3 (on his scale) but demand strength 99. For example, forum sites that reject passwords that my bank would consider good enough.
My plea to anyone reading this who develops websites: The strength of the password only has to match the importance of the information that it's protecting.
Thus endeth my rant.
Slashdot and Digg are in a competition now? To be completely blunt I would consider them to be catering to completely different audiences who are interested in two different fields of computing where the only demographic that crosses over are the causal users. Slashdot has the more computer savvy groups and Digg has the gamer and script kiddie groups. Timing for articles can be considered a problem on /. for example a massive tsunami that killed over half a million in thirty minutes on boxing day two years ago took weeks to get a minor mention whereas Steve Erwin's death was up before most Australians knew about it. Then again it is the price we pay for having an editor based system and in one hand we can yell at them for prioritising the news and in the other we can yell at them for posting crap. Or we can ignore both hands as long as it is generally good and let them be.
My two cents.
I ate your fish.
Perhaps there would be MySpacers writing on message boards about how stupid all Slashdot users were for their poor fashion sense.
not dressing emo != poor fashion sense
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
I read both sites because I like the different articles on each. But lately many of the same articles are on both. I suspect people are seeing articles there and submitting them here. I'd like to see variety again.
It's a girl!
Maybe the author did find the 20,000 passwords, I am guessing most are not MySpace passwords. Myspace requires a number or non-alpha character in the password, but the article lists many that are all alpha.
these folks were stupid enough to give login, passwords to a phishing site.
not exactly rocket scientists
That's the comment id.
Didn't this blogger commit a computer crime (at least in the US) by downloading the password file?
Spent some time putting some ads on the site.
-Michael, AKA Frankie.
But, what about the cross section of people who get spam telling them to enter their MySpace username/password? Per TFA, the author does not have a MySpace account. (Nor do I, but I don't know if I've gotten this spam or not.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
In my experience, usually if either site gets an article before the other, it will be at Digg first. However, I am always glad when an interesting article I read at Digg shows up later on Slashdot, because that means I know I will get some great comments and interesting threads.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
for safety used brute force techinque
which is use character like &,$,%,@,*,+ and etc..
'So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!'
Never ever use english word as a password... it has very low strength even you include numbers with it, it still not increase the strength.. use random characters as your password... eventhough hard to memorize..
Mainly because so many people pick "common" passwords. If the phrase or word is long enough, the subs should be harmless, especially if lower and upper case are alternated. In general, the longer the password, the better it is. There's also a tip that we should insert any symbol into our password..
try take a look @ http://tehpost.blogspot.com/2006/09/myspace-phishi ng-scam.html/
p/s: Make sure you truly logout after logon to myspace..peace..