Thursday, June 1st, 2006, 3:25 am
Passwords and Laziness
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I have just learned (through Bruce Schneier) that, in a large German dating site, the password “123456″ works 1.4% of the time and 2.5% of all passwords begin with “1234″. People are simply lazy or unwilling to memorise passwords. This all means that it would only take about 60 attempts to break into a user’s account.
In an era of Web services, remembering many password can be difficult. For this reason, I personally chose the ‘master password’ approach, as I call it, and I also manage everything as such on my PDA. Password choices are a very important matter, which is something you come to realise only when you get hacked/cracked. In the case of unencrypted comminication, they need to be changed very regularly, as well.
