{"id":135,"date":"2007-03-27T18:20:54","date_gmt":"2007-03-27T18:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/03\/27\/cracking-weak-passwords\/"},"modified":"2007-03-27T18:40:39","modified_gmt":"2007-03-27T18:40:39","slug":"cracking-weak-passwords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/03\/27\/cracking-weak-passwords\/","title":{"rendered":"Cracking weak passwords"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A really interesting read over at One Mans entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/onemansblog.com\/2007\/03\/26\/how-id-hack-your-weak-passwords\/\">How I&#8217;d crack your weak passwords<\/a>&#8220;. The article outlines how he&#8217;d go about cracking weak passwords, which involves making some educated guesses which in 20% of cases actually succeed. If they don&#8217;t he resorts to brute force attacks.The attacks can vary in the amount of time they take to crack a password, with the time increasing depending on the strength of the password. Here&#8217;s a table that demonstrates this, and should illustrate why its a good idea to use strong passwords:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/assets\/resources\/2007\/03\/password%20table.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>People are generally very bad at selecting strong passwords, the OneMan provides a some tips on how you can go about selecting a strong password. One tool that he recommends and that I have used in the past is Microsofts <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/athome\/security\/privacy\/password_checker.mspx\">Password Strength Tester<\/a>. Another tool is Google&#8217;s password checker, which is driven by a URL request that returns an integer in the range 1 &#8211; 4, where 4 means Strong and 1 means very weak, for example, the password &#8220;123456&#8221; returns 1 denoting its very weak:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/accounts\/RatePassword?Passwd=123456\">https:\/\/www.google.com\/accounts\/RatePassword?Passwd=123456<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s relatively simple to integrate Google&#8217;s solution into your own web applications, however I should point out that the company does not provide any official branding or user interface, and im not sure how long they will continue to provide it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A really interesting read over at One Mans entitled &#8220;How I&#8217;d crack your weak passwords&#8220;. The article outlines how he&#8217;d go about cracking weak passwords, which involves making some educated guesses which in 20% of cases actually succeed. If they &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/03\/27\/cracking-weak-passwords\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6,25],"tags":[387,386,405],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-microsoft","category-security","tag-google","tag-microsoft","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/virtualchaos.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}