Slashdot Mirror
Yep, People Are Still Using '123456' and 'Password' As Passwords In 2014
Nerval's Lobster writes "Earlier this week, SplashData released its annual list of the 25 most common passwords used on the Internet — and no surprise, most are so blindingly obvious it's a shock that people still rely on them to protect their data: '12345,' 'password,' 'qwerty' '11111,' and worse. There were some interesting quirks in the dataset, however. Following a massive security breach in late 2013, a large amount of Adobe users' passwords leaked onto the broader Web; many of those users based their password on either 'Adobe' or 'Photoshop,' which are terms (along with the ever-popular 'password') easily discoverable using today's hacker tools. 'Seeing passwords like "adobe123" and "photoshop" on this list offers a good reminder not to base your password on the name of the website or application you are accessing,' Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData, wrote in a statement. Slashdotters have known for years that while it's always tempting to create a password that's easy to remember — especially if you maintain profiles on multiple online services — the consequences of an attacker breaking into your accounts are potentially devastating."
Quoth, "It's a shock that people still rely on them to protect their data".
Important fact that many of these studies miss: not everybody cares about their data, and not all data is the same. Anyone using a password like this to protect their bank account, or their email address (that they use to send forgotten password requests from their bank account) deserves to have their money stolen.
On the other hand, anyone who uses a password like this to protect the fact that they once logged into some random crappy site that they joined to post one comment, and which they have subsequently never used again and have forgotten about, deserves... absolutely nothing bad to happen to them as a result. Who cares if someone gets their password to some random crappy site? I certainly don't. It would be a much worse idea to use a more secure password to those throwaway sites, because then you'd be tempted to use the same password you used on more secure sites you actually cared about.
There are probably a lot of passwords to throwaway sites like that in any database of stolen passwords, specifically because people are more likely to use better passwords on the sorts of sites that are also (I certainly hope!) less likely to get all their passwords leaked.
Create a password: password
Everyone is using "password." We need to stop that.
Create a password containing both letters and numbers: password1
Everyone is using "password1." We need to stop that.
Create a password containing numbers and both capital and lowercase letters: Password1
Everyone is using "Password1." We need to stop that.
Create a password containing numbers, both capital and lowercase letters and a special symbol: Password1!
And so it goes.
My simple process for this is that if the site does not have my credit card info or even my name then I don't care what the password is.
And I don't care if your site is cracked any my 12345 password is revealed. All they're going to get is the cat's name and a birthdate of 1900-01-01.
Unless I, as the criminal mastermind that I am, decide to try 'Facebook123', 'Chase123', etc, etc.
And strong passwords are meaningless if the company is storing them in a really stupid way such that they can be recovered in plain text by an attacker. At that point, adobe123 is no less secure than a 64-character randomly-generated password.
Of course they do. Anyone surprised?
One of the reasons (one, it's a complex topic) is that we, the security professionals, are too dense to properly explain things in a language the user understands correctly.
For example, we tell them their password should be difficult to guess. But "guess" is the entirely wrong word to use, because it implies something that's not happening in the real world. When you say "guess" to a normal person, his mental image is that of some attacker thinking there, trying a few different things. What we experts mean is that some script will do 10,000 login attempts with a dictionary attack, or some hacker will check your pilfered password hash against a rainbow table.
Quite a few regular users are seriously convinced that "123456" is a "hard to guess" password, because it wouldn't be their first or second guess for someone elses password.
Here's what you need to do, IMNSHO:
We've had several of these breaches with leaked passwords over the years. Collect them, take the top 10,000 or so passwords and put them into a list. Add that list to John with a simple (because you want to be fast) ruleset for permutations. When the user picks a password, run that in the background. And instead of telling him to use a "difficult to guess" password, tell him that you run the same program that some evil people use, and if it can crack his password, he needs to use a different one.
Tell him that John needed 0.0253 (or whatever) seconds to crack his password, and show him the rule so he understands (e.g. "passw0rd" is a permutation of "password", the #2 most often used password).
It'll take 20 minutes for him to find a password that works, and he'll have to write it down to remember it. Problem solv... oh, wait...
Maybe, you know, the problem is in the method. Passwords suck.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
A site like Adobe, if I had to have an account there for some reason, would have no relationship to other accounts, would need no particular security because it would be unimportant, and even remembering a password would be too much bother.
Now Slashdot, my password for that is important, it's *************8**
Is that 12 or 13 stars before the 8? I keep trying to log in as Anonymous Coward with the password you provided and it's not working. Or does the 8 need to be capitalized?
Won't work. People would use a blank password if the websites which require registration to download something free or access a support forum allowed it. So what do you start with? Name of the company. Nope, has to have letters AND numbers. So adobe123. That's a password which says "I don't give a fuck. I'm not even going to use this account again. Just let me download this file." It does not mean that people use the same scheme for passwords to sites where a hacked account could actually do them some harm. Anyway, remember how we know what passwords people use: The companies which demand ever more complex passwords don't properly secure them and lose them, in cleartext form! How can you expect users to care when not even the companies whose business depends on customers' trust care?
You are missing the point. Adobe.com should not be telling me my password is insecure. Adobe.com should not be asking me for passwords in the first place, because the idea that I should need a seperate password for Adobe.com is stupid. Implement OpenID properly and allow people to log in with an already existing identity. The biggest problem with passwords on the internet is every single mom and pop website thinks they need to have their own login and authentication mechanism when in reality all they need is a way to confirm an identity. My nirvana is every single website in existance allows me to log in with my OpenID account, which is nice and secure and has two factor authentication. Then I only have ONE password to remember.
There is absolutely no reason the internet could not work this way if site admins would get their heads out of their asses and stop rolling their own authentication schemes, because between Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, and other 3rd parties, every web user already HAS an OpenID capable login..