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MySpace Users Have Stronger Passwords Than Employees
Ant writes "A Wired News column reports on Bruce Schneier's analysis of data from a successful phishing attack on MySpace, and compares the captured user-passwords to an earlier data-set from a corporation. He concludes that MySpace users are better at coming up with good passwords than corporate drones." From the article: "We used to quip that 'password' is the most common password. Now it's 'password1.' Who said users haven't learned anything about security? But seriously, passwords are getting better. I'm impressed that less than 4 percent were dictionary words and that the great majority were at least alphanumeric. Writing in 1989, Daniel Klein was able to crack (.gz) 24 percent of his sample passwords with a small dictionary of just 63,000 words, and found that the average password was 6.4 characters long."
That's the kind of password an idiot would have on his electronic luggage!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Love, Sexxxx, and...GOD. So, would her royal highness care to change her password?"
Living With a Nerd
...found that the average password was 6.4 characters long. What kind of newfangled keyboard do you need to type one of those in?!why? forty-two.
I use this password ;#E4][££2&9a for everything..
Oops?
a 14 year old cares far more about their social life than most adults care about their jobs.
How do you get .4 characters? What's 2/5 of 8 bits? 16/5?
That's so kewel. NO one will guess that.
Amazing! That's the same password I have on my luggage!
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Wow. We MySpace usrz hav BetA security. hu wouldve thunk it. It's not lIk Im doin NEthing dfrnt. Im not lIk tinkN security 24-7.
MySpace passwords would fail more often if a l33t dictionary was used instead. Do kids even know words from a plain old dictionary?
Maybe the users just used their usernames as passwords - that would probably be the best way to generate a random sequence of characters.
Of course dictionary attacks won't work - have you seen the spelling on MySpace?!? It's not that they are trying to be more secure, it's that the users can't spell well enough to get a dictionary match.
Getoffamylawn!
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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For sale: Signature. One owner. Low miles. Always garaged. New punctuation, just installed!
I love when the editors just copy and paste without even reading what they're posting. Which part of that sentence was a
Maybe MySpace users just can't spell....
found that the average password was 6.4 characters long
6.4 character-long passwords are extremely secure!
Every password-cracking scheme that I've seen goes right from 6 character strings to 7 character strings.
You're going to have trouble typing my password, as it's 6.4 characters long. The first six characters are 'passwo' The .4 consists of 'r' and 'd' type in such a way as to only use 0.2 of each. :-)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)