Hacked Syrian Officials Used '12345' As Email Password 231
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)."
Re:You know... (Score:5, Interesting)
yep never use the same user name or password for different sites you care about, at the minimum.
FTFY. I mean, really, nobody has the mental capacity to remember a unique, strong password for every titchy site they have an account on.
Me, I have a strong, unique password for the handful of things that deserve it (My workstation, email, banking, facebook) and then a common password that I use among all the other sites, that I really don't care about being compromised.
Re:You know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but every now and then, some *site* uses a poor hash, which allows people like me to do research on password strength and frequency. These results don't exhibit the selection bias you're talking about, because they're a full dump of passwords on the site. This is just for one specific site, but I found that 36% of all passwords were easily discoverable using a rainbow table, 33% of passwords weren't unique, and 1 in 72 users had the password "super123" for some reason.
The link you provide supports that this is selection bias - he cracked 26025 out of 93688 passwords, and then made the brilliant deduction that boils down to "of those passwords that I easily cracked, most were found to be easily cracked". No shit, Sherlock.
Sure, that 36% of passwords are easily cracked is bad in itself, but that's another thing entirely. It can't be used as statistics to extrapolate anything using the word "most". It only applies to that subset of weak password.
I also have to arrest you for " I found that 36% of all passwords were easily discoverable using a rainbow table". This is incorrect. 100% of all passwords are easily discoverable using a rainbow table. 36% may be easily discoverable using a partial rainbow table, which is not the same thing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IT did warn them (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if Assad's quite that malevolent. I sure wouldn't have wanted to have been Uday Hussein's IT manager, that's for sure.
Re:That's amazing (Score:1, Interesting)
Came for this, leaving satisfied!! This thread will go to plaid soon.
"Score:5, Insightful" - really??? Did I get forwarded to reddit somehow?