[kictanet] SPAM-LOW: Re: Hacked password list offers security insights

Tue Feb 10 09:24:34 EAT 2009

Washington,
I completely agree with you on users not caring about their passwords on community websites. 
Unfortunately, when it comes to social networking web sites, people tell all -- who they are, what they like to do and what's happening at that exact moment. Consequently, with this weak passwords, hackers  "hijack" their profiles and go after internet contacts. This is one of the newest scams to hit the internet. Hackers somehow take over users pages and pose as them online. 

Case in point, "Facebook user Bryan Rutberg of Seattle, Wash., had his profile hacked into by someone who changed his status to: "Bryan Rutberg NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!" Many friends immediately responded to the status change wanting to know what had happened to him. One friend, Beny Rubenstein, got a direct message from Rutberg saying he had been robbed at gunpoint while in England and was in desperate need of cash in order to get home. Being a good (but dumb) person, he wired his thought-to-be troubled friend $1,143 in two installments, only to find out Rutberg was sitting home safely in Seattle. Rubenstein told CNN that he misses the money he lost, but feels worse about being tricked by someone impersonating his friend on the Web site."

Evans Kahuthu

----------------------------------------

From: Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 8:26 AM
To: ekahuthu at comtechltd.co.ke
Subject: SPAM-LOW: Re: [kictanet] Hacked password list offers security insights 

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:27 AM, Evans Kahuthu <ekahuthu at comtechltd.co.ke> wrote:

Recently a niche programming-oriented website called phpbb.com had its user database hacked into and the passwords for 20,000 members stolen. The hacker who broke in then posted the account info and passwords online for the world to see. And while this is really bad news for those 20,000 unlucky souls, it offers an instructive lesson on password security  for the rest of us. 

InformationWeek analyzed the hacked password list and found a number of interesting trends in the data, primarily revolving around the fact that most people do exactly what they've been told not to do since passwords were first invented.

Author/analyst Robert Graham has tons of analysis on offer. I'm ordering my favorite/most enlightening data points from the piece here, starting with the most interesting. On thing to remember: These passwords are from a group of people interested in computer programming, so if anyone should know better, it's these guys.

> The most popular password (3.03% of the 20,000) was "123456." It's also generally considered the most common password used today . 

> 4 percent used some variant of the word "password." Seriously, people, there's no excuse for this one. "password" was the 2nd most popular password used, also in keeping with historical trends.

> 16 percent of passwords were a person's first name. No word on if it was their first name, but someone's. Joshua is the most commonly used first-name password, a likely reference to the movie WarGames.

> Patterns abound. In addition to "123456," other pattens like "12345, "qwerty," and "abc123" were common, comprising 14 percent of the passwords used.

> 35 percent of passwords were six characters long. 0.34 percent were only one character long.

> For reasons no one can explain, "dragon," "master," and "killer" all crack the top 20 passwords. (On the top 500 password list linked above, "dragon" is #7.) 

> One thing Graham doesn't discuss is that phpbb.com is really just a message board, and many users may simply have not cared about the security of their passwords here (unlike, say, with a bank account). In other words, they may very well have intentionally chosen something simplistic here to avoid re-using a password they save for an important login, just in case this site got hacked. Which, it turns out, it did. 

I could go on, but Graham's post has way more detail than I can digest here and it's easy-reading too. Worth a close look for any citizen of the web. 

Personally, I believe noone really cares about the strength (or lack of) the passwords they use on community sites. To start with, there is a stage in the registration process into such sites (or Bulletin Boards if you may call them) which warns you NOT TO USE any of your sensitive passwords that you use elsewhere. Given that noone really stores any sensitive material on such sites it's not uncommon to simply use 123456 (because the registration system insists on your password having at least six characters) or something like "letmein".
I don't believe it was "really bad news for the 20,000 unlucky souls" at all. Rather, the lesson to be learn here, IMHO, is by those souls deploying systems that are accessible to the hostile Internet to take seriously security considerations for those systems.

-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
"The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby."
                             - Natalie Wood

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