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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: 75% positive, 4 total Votes
Categories: black hat security passwords cracking
Added: on Jan 16, 2008 at 10:31 am
Added By: an anonymous user

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