jetdawgg
03-25-08, 11:57 AM
<TABLE class=ttable><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top>Most Common Passwords Posted on Thursday, March 20 2008 </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Most people are clueless as to how accounts are hacked and their passwords reflect that. If you find anything in common with the most common passwords below you have a weak password. This is to help people choose a strong password and possibly help site admins understand the risks.
Most Common Passwords
123456, 123, 123123, 01234, 2468, 987654, etc
123abc, abc123, 246abc
First Name
Favorite Band
Favorite Song
first letter of given name then surname
qwerty, asdf, and other keyboard rolls
Favorite cartoon or movie character
Favorite sport, or sports star
Country of origin
City of origin
All numbers
Some word in the dictionary
Combining 2 dictionary words
any of the above spelled backwards
aaa, eee, llll, 999999, and other repeat combinationsCommon Extensions
Some sites force you to have passwords with both numbers and letters. For example bob's password is football, and the site asks him to add some numbers to it to make it valid. Here's what people usually add.
Their year of birth / marriage / graduation (or expected grad) from HS or college
007
0 - 9
69
000, 111, 4444 or other long combinations
123456, 123, 123123, 01234 and other retarded combinationsYears are usually added in different ways: football85, football1985, football04 instead of football4. There's also the possibility of sub-connections like football_04 and football-84. Many sites require both numbers and letters so these are a more likely occurance since people tend to want to have the same pass for everything.
My opinion on an Ideal password
Mixed numbers and letters over 8 characters long. Memorize it once, use it forever.
How long it takes to hack a password
If they have hacked and downloaded the entire database it's 10000 times faster than if they send requests guessing your passwords on certain websites. Most decent comps can check easily thousands possibilities per second.
Words in the Dictionary
You'll get hacked fast, even if you use foreign words.
Numbers
If you have an all numbers password it's much faster to crack than if it were mixed. Instead of having a massive array of words in memory and selecting an index from it, or even worse reading from disk every few seconds in a buffer, having a number just requires the computer to do what computers do fastest, count. A decent computer can easily do any number under 10 million in a few minutes. Adding 0s to the front of the number can help, but not really. A second pass with any number of 0s can be done afterwards. Maybe if you made it your zipcode+your best friends number or something VERY long it would be strong enough.
All Random letters
Every possible combination of 3 letter words is only around 17000 while every possible 4 letter word combination is 456976. It grows exponentially every time you increase just one letter. Most sites recommend 8 characters or more for a strong password. Adding just 1 number to your password helps immensely.
How hackers usually obtain your password
Most malicious hackers just wait for security update news. Whenever some forum or cms software like drupal, vbulletin, phpbb or invision board releases a security update, they try and find what the discovered exploit was. They google search for forums that may have the affected system and use the exploit. Forums can give tons of emails / passwords.
The ones who are skilled enough and actively attempt to discover the exploits are more rare.
Even worse is when the skilled programmers make simple automated exploit programs for script kiddies to use without even understanding the code. This is where the majority of the attacks come from, losers that use programs made by hacker and call themselves hackers.
It's super rare that you would be targeted or your password has been hacked from large sites like google, hotmail or myspace. Most of the big sites have capchas and DDoS protection, which cripples speed, It's more likely they hacked some other site that you long forgot about and found more passwords in your email. Most people get hacked from phising attempts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing) or other forms of social engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(computer_security)) rather than real hackers. People also get trojans from opening email extensions and downloading pirate stuff off p2p without a decent antivirus. Hackers with skills enough to find open ports / exploit them and get shell access are much more rare than people claim.
How are passwords stored in a website
Most are stored as md5 (http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=site:wikipedia.org+md5) hashes. If your password is stored without encryption you are screwed if they get screwed. It doesn't matter how long your password is. Sites like thepiratebay and stage6 have gotten their passwords stolen, don't think it can't happen to big sites. You can tell if a site encrypts your password by using their password recovery form. If it gives you your password your password is not encrypted. If it asks you to enter a new one or it generates a password for you, it has your password encrypted.
Dangers of md5
Sites like milw0rm (http://www.milw0rm.com/) and plain-text (http://www.plain-text.info/search/) have millions, maybe billions of precomputed hash values in what are called rainbow tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table). People can enter hashes in limited quantities to put on queue for cracking. md5 is a one-way hash, meaning it can't be decrypted. Instead, they try every possible combination in a limited range. Other sites (http://gdataonline.com/) are just (http://md5encryption.com/) searchable databases of hashes. You still should be ok if your pass is over 8 characters long. Some sites do double md5s or concatenate md5 encrypted passwords with an encrypted "salted" value, then encrypt the whole thing again. This prevents rainbow tables, but does not prevent brute force attacks. Brute force attacks use word lists separated by line breaks which are widely available around the net and can be easily created.
Time taken testing all possible combinations
I made my own crappy brute force program just from boredom. It can check 1 million salted md5 possibilities in 7.4 seconds on a 2Ghz computer. Here's the specs on the approximate calculation time:
<TABLE cellSpacing=5 cellPadding=5 border=1><TBODY><TR><TH>Pass Length</TH><TH>a-z</TH><TH>a-z, 0-9</TH></TR><TR><TH>3 Characters</TH><TD>1s</TD><TD>1s</TD></TR><TR><TH>4 Characters</TH><TD>3s</TD><TD>12s</TD></TR><TR><TH>5 Characters</TH><TD>1m30s</TD><TD>7m</TD></TR><TR><TH>6 Characters</TH><TD>39min</TD><TD>4h30m</TD></TR><TR><TH>7 Characters</TH><TD>16hours</TD><TD>7 days</TD></TR><TR><TH>8 Characters</TH><TD>18days</TD><TD>246 days</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Making your password case sensitive helps exponentially, specifically ^+26 lol, but it makes typing a pass a bit more inconvenient and not all sites support it. I'm sure my prog isn't the most efficient possible and there are way faster comps out there so be careful.
What is hacking
Contrary to popular belief and the Hollywood culture, hackers are just people that can manipulate things on a bits and bytes level. They're excellent programmers and the majority do not engage in illegal activity. Making something do what it wasn't intended to is exploiting, not hacking.
Tags: most common passwords, md5 rainbow tables, crack md5 list, reverse engineer md5, spanish dictionary word list, english word list, all possible 4 letter words, brute force md5 attack, invisionboard attack salted, lm, hack myspace passwords, capcha cracker, captcha hack, hacking
http://blog.jimmyr.com/Most_Common_Passwords_20_2008.php
Most people are clueless as to how accounts are hacked and their passwords reflect that. If you find anything in common with the most common passwords below you have a weak password. This is to help people choose a strong password and possibly help site admins understand the risks.
Most Common Passwords
123456, 123, 123123, 01234, 2468, 987654, etc
123abc, abc123, 246abc
First Name
Favorite Band
Favorite Song
first letter of given name then surname
qwerty, asdf, and other keyboard rolls
Favorite cartoon or movie character
Favorite sport, or sports star
Country of origin
City of origin
All numbers
Some word in the dictionary
Combining 2 dictionary words
any of the above spelled backwards
aaa, eee, llll, 999999, and other repeat combinationsCommon Extensions
Some sites force you to have passwords with both numbers and letters. For example bob's password is football, and the site asks him to add some numbers to it to make it valid. Here's what people usually add.
Their year of birth / marriage / graduation (or expected grad) from HS or college
007
0 - 9
69
000, 111, 4444 or other long combinations
123456, 123, 123123, 01234 and other retarded combinationsYears are usually added in different ways: football85, football1985, football04 instead of football4. There's also the possibility of sub-connections like football_04 and football-84. Many sites require both numbers and letters so these are a more likely occurance since people tend to want to have the same pass for everything.
My opinion on an Ideal password
Mixed numbers and letters over 8 characters long. Memorize it once, use it forever.
How long it takes to hack a password
If they have hacked and downloaded the entire database it's 10000 times faster than if they send requests guessing your passwords on certain websites. Most decent comps can check easily thousands possibilities per second.
Words in the Dictionary
You'll get hacked fast, even if you use foreign words.
Numbers
If you have an all numbers password it's much faster to crack than if it were mixed. Instead of having a massive array of words in memory and selecting an index from it, or even worse reading from disk every few seconds in a buffer, having a number just requires the computer to do what computers do fastest, count. A decent computer can easily do any number under 10 million in a few minutes. Adding 0s to the front of the number can help, but not really. A second pass with any number of 0s can be done afterwards. Maybe if you made it your zipcode+your best friends number or something VERY long it would be strong enough.
All Random letters
Every possible combination of 3 letter words is only around 17000 while every possible 4 letter word combination is 456976. It grows exponentially every time you increase just one letter. Most sites recommend 8 characters or more for a strong password. Adding just 1 number to your password helps immensely.
How hackers usually obtain your password
Most malicious hackers just wait for security update news. Whenever some forum or cms software like drupal, vbulletin, phpbb or invision board releases a security update, they try and find what the discovered exploit was. They google search for forums that may have the affected system and use the exploit. Forums can give tons of emails / passwords.
The ones who are skilled enough and actively attempt to discover the exploits are more rare.
Even worse is when the skilled programmers make simple automated exploit programs for script kiddies to use without even understanding the code. This is where the majority of the attacks come from, losers that use programs made by hacker and call themselves hackers.
It's super rare that you would be targeted or your password has been hacked from large sites like google, hotmail or myspace. Most of the big sites have capchas and DDoS protection, which cripples speed, It's more likely they hacked some other site that you long forgot about and found more passwords in your email. Most people get hacked from phising attempts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing) or other forms of social engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(computer_security)) rather than real hackers. People also get trojans from opening email extensions and downloading pirate stuff off p2p without a decent antivirus. Hackers with skills enough to find open ports / exploit them and get shell access are much more rare than people claim.
How are passwords stored in a website
Most are stored as md5 (http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=site:wikipedia.org+md5) hashes. If your password is stored without encryption you are screwed if they get screwed. It doesn't matter how long your password is. Sites like thepiratebay and stage6 have gotten their passwords stolen, don't think it can't happen to big sites. You can tell if a site encrypts your password by using their password recovery form. If it gives you your password your password is not encrypted. If it asks you to enter a new one or it generates a password for you, it has your password encrypted.
Dangers of md5
Sites like milw0rm (http://www.milw0rm.com/) and plain-text (http://www.plain-text.info/search/) have millions, maybe billions of precomputed hash values in what are called rainbow tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table). People can enter hashes in limited quantities to put on queue for cracking. md5 is a one-way hash, meaning it can't be decrypted. Instead, they try every possible combination in a limited range. Other sites (http://gdataonline.com/) are just (http://md5encryption.com/) searchable databases of hashes. You still should be ok if your pass is over 8 characters long. Some sites do double md5s or concatenate md5 encrypted passwords with an encrypted "salted" value, then encrypt the whole thing again. This prevents rainbow tables, but does not prevent brute force attacks. Brute force attacks use word lists separated by line breaks which are widely available around the net and can be easily created.
Time taken testing all possible combinations
I made my own crappy brute force program just from boredom. It can check 1 million salted md5 possibilities in 7.4 seconds on a 2Ghz computer. Here's the specs on the approximate calculation time:
<TABLE cellSpacing=5 cellPadding=5 border=1><TBODY><TR><TH>Pass Length</TH><TH>a-z</TH><TH>a-z, 0-9</TH></TR><TR><TH>3 Characters</TH><TD>1s</TD><TD>1s</TD></TR><TR><TH>4 Characters</TH><TD>3s</TD><TD>12s</TD></TR><TR><TH>5 Characters</TH><TD>1m30s</TD><TD>7m</TD></TR><TR><TH>6 Characters</TH><TD>39min</TD><TD>4h30m</TD></TR><TR><TH>7 Characters</TH><TD>16hours</TD><TD>7 days</TD></TR><TR><TH>8 Characters</TH><TD>18days</TD><TD>246 days</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Making your password case sensitive helps exponentially, specifically ^+26 lol, but it makes typing a pass a bit more inconvenient and not all sites support it. I'm sure my prog isn't the most efficient possible and there are way faster comps out there so be careful.
What is hacking
Contrary to popular belief and the Hollywood culture, hackers are just people that can manipulate things on a bits and bytes level. They're excellent programmers and the majority do not engage in illegal activity. Making something do what it wasn't intended to is exploiting, not hacking.
Tags: most common passwords, md5 rainbow tables, crack md5 list, reverse engineer md5, spanish dictionary word list, english word list, all possible 4 letter words, brute force md5 attack, invisionboard attack salted, lm, hack myspace passwords, capcha cracker, captcha hack, hacking
http://blog.jimmyr.com/Most_Common_Passwords_20_2008.php