Hacked Syrian Officials Used '12345' As Email Password

Nominei writes "The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password '12345' (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course)."

Assads email wasn't hacked

[highwaytohell]

It was just the dept staff. Looked like it was hacked through the webmail portal of mopa.gov.sy. The only thing of note was the exchange re the Barbara Walters visit. The Ministry of Presidential Affairs is basically his marketing department. Whilst one would hope they busted into this despots email, the truth is they did no such thing.

Re:Palin Popcorn Password

[Dwedit]

That never happened.

Someone guessed Sarah Palin's security questions (such as "Where did you first meet your spouse" with the answer of her high school in Alaska), and got into the account. Then the password was changed to popcorn.

Re:12345

[rahvin112]

Governments will go to extreme lengths to avoid revealing when they have access to information that the "enemy" thinks is secure. The allies went to very extreme measures to avoid tipping the Germans off that they had access to all the communications that went out on the Enigma machine. This included letting their own troops be ambushed and killed and massive use of resources and manpower to cover up when they did use the information, such as flying a hundred aerial survey missions to cover up knowing the travel path of a sea convoy.

Re:Palin Popcorn Password

[rahvin112]

Not minimal, none. He got like 80 hours of community service. No fine and no jail time. The guy should be in jail for fraud and slander/libel at a minimum and for trying to tap a member of congresses phone he should be in jail for espionage. Anyone that thinks that jackass is a hero needs their head examined.

Re:Mine is 54321 UNREAL

[gmuslera]

Or this approach for secure passwords [xkcd.com]. You must make it hard to guess by other people or brute force approachs, not hard to remember .

Re:IT did warn them

[Bucc5062]

"I don't know if Assad's quite that malevolent. "

You watching the news at all these days? The man is ordering troops to kill anyone, collateral damage is not an issue. I'm just not certain who is worse, the leader of Syria or the leaders of Russia and China for backing that pile of shit.

Re:Mine is 54321 UNREAL

[alreaud]

I actually try that xkcd password now on any word list I use. First...;-)

That approach is Diceware, BTW,
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html [std.com]
http://happycattech.com/book/security-applications-0 [happycattech.com] (MS Excel and OpenOffice Calc implementations)