Most Common Password Hints: asd, dsadsa, asdasd1, asdasdasdasd, easy, keyboard, usual I won’t ruin all 10 puzzles, but there are a few commonly-used passwords and hints worth highlighting. The crossword puzzles are fun and you can play them here, but the fact that it works at all is frightening from a cybersecurity standpoint. The clue for each blank is up to 50 of the most commonly used hints for each password. Someone was inspired by this xkcd comic and created 10 actual crossword puzzles using passwords from the 1,000 most commonly used passwords in the breach. Plus, the most commonly used passwords are shockingly easy to guess, especially with hints. The breach cost millions of users their security and credit card data, and it likely cost Adobe millions of dollars to clean up. While xkcd author Randall Munroe was inclined to pick silly hints for entertainment purposes, the actual passwords and hints this breach revealed were no laughing matter. Password hints are also a liability in the event of a data breach, as Adobe and Adobe users painfully discovered during a data breach that released details for over 153 million accounts in 2013 – including password hints.Ĭlues intended to help users maintain access to their accounts became shortcuts for attackers to gain access either through simple guesswork, or by giving their brute-force password guessing programs a set of parameters to work within.įor less-malicious people who try to find the games in life, the password hints became a crossword puzzle. XKCD Encryptic: Turning a Breach into a Crossword Puzzle Now multiple accounts have been compromised. Worse yet, if you’re like most users, you have a variation of that same password on most websites. That’s enough information for bad guys to guess your password. “Happy ‘Gotcha Day’ to my favorite pupper, Shadow! Can’t believe he’s been in my life for five years now.” You love your dog so much you made the following post to Twinstabook. Well, considering the fact that you’re reading an article about how accounts are compromised by way of password hint, the answer is obviously no! You can even include a vague hint that should be enough to remind you without being too specific. You can incorporate both of those into a nice, easy-to-remember password. You really love Shadow and you’ll never forget the day you brought him home, December 12. The attackers don’t have to actually know anything about you, or be family, to succeed with this method either. A brute force attack is a waste of time if the attackers can just accurately guess the information relevant to you. When you create a password with a piece of information about your life – as most people do so they can remember the password – you are giving attackers another way in. Still, it counts as an account compromise. He just needed to print an assignment for school while I wasn’t home – and it’s not like a 12-year-old has bank accounts or sensitive documents that could be stolen anyways. Thankfully, he didn’t have any malicious intentions. One day, my little brother was able to guess my password to “hack” into my laptop. It was easy to remember and if I ever did forget, the password hints “What is your favorite Pokémon?” would always be there to help me remember! Unfortunately, password hints are just as helpful for would-be-attackers as they are for you. Photo via ZeWrestler on Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I would include a number (mudkip96), or a number, uppercase, and a special character (Mudkip96!), but the passwords all featured my favorite fictional axolotl nonetheless. The first passwords I used as a kid all featured my first and favorite Pokémon, Mudkip. Published on 12th November 2020 Author: Blane Erwin Password Hints: Could your ex guess your password?
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