Slashdot Mirror
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."
So MySpace users are smart enough to pick somewhat secure passwords, but still dumb enough to fall for basic phishing attacks.
It doesn't matter how strong their password is if they are still giving it to whoever asks for it.
This may not mean that "passwords are getting better." It may just prove once again that people care more about their personal things than other people's stuff.
a 14 year old cares far more about their social life than most adults care about their jobs.
It easy to have Strong Passwords when you don't need to change them all the time and can't reuse parts of the old password in the new password.
Maybe the users just used their usernames as passwords - that would probably be the best way to generate a random sequence of characters.
You need to use an average keyboard because an average keyboard has 101.4 keys.
"you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2"
*Cough*
This is not my sig.