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!
- 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 |
