Tip Details

Rate as: Positive Negative

Hacking the password of someone you know

If you know someone that's not computer security-savy, there's a fair chance that you can crack their passwords without requiring any special security tools or hacking knowledge. Your average computer user will pick a password that falls into one of the following categories.

- Wife/husband/child/pet name.
- A simple sequence of numbers: 12345, 234567, etc
- City they have lived in
- Favorite sports/college team name
- Date of birth of themselves, spouse, kids
- Last four digits of their social security number
- "password"... you'd be surprised how often this works!

In all of the above cases, if the site requires a number in the password, the number is usually a single digit appended to the end of the password.

While this is far from full-proof, from research done in the field of passwords, you can expect that about 25% of people will have passwords that fall into one of the bins listed above, thus making them easy targets to hack.

Make sure you aren't in one of these bins!
Rating: 60% positive, 15 total Votes
Categories: black hat security passwords cracking
Added: on Jan 16, 2008 at 10:31 am
Added By: an anonymous user
Searches: password security hat black number

Comments on this Tip

Add a Comment
There are no comments for this tip
Your Comment:
(how to format)
Rate This Tip:

Verify Humanity:
Sorry, we know it's annoying, but please enter the characters shown in the image to the left so that we know you're an actual person and not an evil spammer. Thanks.
       

Related Tips

Hack a locked iPhone

45% positive, 2 comments - last added on Aug 30, 2008 at 7:14 am
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Aug 29, 2008 at 7:17 am

Read private twitter messages

38% positive, 4 comments - last added on Sep 07, 2009 at 2:07 am
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Oct 25, 2008 at 9:44 pm

Reveal passwords on web forms

Categories: web security hack black hat
100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Dec 17, 2007 at 1:23 pm

Keep Windows password from expiring

80% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Aug 31, 2007 at 9:34 am

Lock the login screen on Windows XP

100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Sep 09, 2008 at 4:21 pm

Checking password strength

Categories: passwords security
100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Sep 09, 2007 at 2:23 pm

Crack passwords legally

Categories: hack black hat cracking
100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Jun 24, 2007 at 9:53 pm

password protect iWork '09 documents

100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Jan 28, 2009 at 9:30 am

Enforce minimum password lengths in XP

100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Nov 26, 2008 at 7:50 am

Checking password strength

100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Mar 21, 2008 at 11:21 am

Pick a master lock combination lock

Categories: locks black hat cracking
33% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Sep 18, 2007 at 7:19 pm

Checking password strength

Categories: security passwords
100% positive, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Jul 15, 2007 at 7:18 am

Guessing passwords

Categories: security passwords
no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Jan 23, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Forcing users to change their password

no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Sep 30, 2008 at 11:27 am

Change default blog passwords

no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Mar 13, 2008 at 1:01 pm

Lost password in Windows XP

no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Jun 07, 2007 at 11:06 am

Web Sites asking you to hit F1

no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Mar 04, 2010 at 9:27 am

How to turn off Google Buzz

Categories: Google Buzz security Gmail
no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Feb 18, 2010 at 1:14 pm

Avoiding programming mistakes

Categories: programming security
no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Feb 17, 2010 at 5:11 pm

Download a PGP key from a PGP Universal server to a Storm 2

no ratings, 0 comments
– Tip added by an anonymous user on Feb 01, 2010 at 1:32 pm