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A Brief Sony Password Analysis

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the change-it-now-people dept.

troyhunt writes "With all this [Sony] customer data now unfortunately out there for public viewing, I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on password practices. There are some rather alarming (although not entirely surprising) findings including: 36% of passwords appear in a common password dictionary. 50% of passwords are 7 characters or less. 67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password. 82% of passwords are lowercase alphanumeric of 9 characters or less. 99% of passwords don't contain a single non-alphanumeric character."

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. As someone who probably fell into some of those by vawwyakr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My sony account only held the minimal information and some of that not correct. The PW I used was my public throw away password that I only use on sites that require me to register when I just need it to use a basic service and not enter anything not already public knowledge. So I'm not going to burn a good PW or spend my time trying to memorize a new one to use for something I really wouldn't care if they cracked and couldn't use the same PW on a site for which I care about it being cracked.

  2. My Best Practices by gregarican · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For my passwords I use the keys one-up-and-to-the-right of the "dictionary style" password I have. For example, for password this would come out as -wee305r, making it harder to brute force. Of course if the passwords are all stored plain text by some incompetents what's the point?!