Lessons Learned From Cracking 2M LinkedIn Passwords

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 11, 2012 @02:23AM from the listen-to-the-learnings dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Qualys researcher Francois Pesce used open source password cracker John the Ripper to try to crack SHA-1 hashes of leaked LinkedIn passwords. He ran the John the Ripper default command on a small default password dictionary of less than 4,000 words. The program then switched to incremental mode based on statistical analysis of known password structures, which generated more probable passwords. The results? After 4 hours, approximately 900,000 passwords had been cracked. Francois then ran numerous iterations, incorporating older dictionaries to uncover less common passwords and ended up cracking a total of 2,000,000 passwords."

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slashdot by rapiddescent · 2012-06-11 02:47 · Score: 5, Funny

own up, who used the password slashdot - 0000003627a75d6c96a3d965247584a78779bc3d
Re:Do not use standard passwords by RenderSeven · 2012-06-11 03:17 · Score: 5, Funny

What an excellent opportunity! I just told everybody on my LinkedIn account what I *really* thought of them, waited an hour, and told them all my password was hacked. Good times, good times.