John from One Man’s Blog posted a very scary article on how he’d hack your weak passwords. Using sniffers and other brute force tools, he’d hack into low priority sites. Rather than hacking a bank account, which has greater tracking and security, he’d start with these low priority accounts, like Flickr. If you’re like most people, you might use that same password for your important accounts: banks, credit cards, medical records.
Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.
Below is just a fun illustration of some of the worst passwords. Please don’t use something like this below. Take a moment now and update and change your passwords. Next post will be on optimal password strategies.
