It turns out the new passwords you keep coming up with for your accounts are actually from the Old Testament. So the Bible is now giving your passwords away to hackers or anyone else who has read it, according to a new report on the future of password cracking.
Password security researcher Kevin Young told Ars Technica how he and fellow researcher John Dustin fed the Bible, among 15,000 others available from the free online repository Project Gutenberg, into the cracking program. The software was able to utilize common words and phrases found in literature and online to crack 344,000 cryptographically protected passwords leaked from the hack of the intelligence firm Stratfor back in 2011.
Ars Technica says both Young and Dustin watched as “a flood of once-stubborn passwords revealed themselves.”
“If we rely on the fact that humans use words, and humans put words together in a certain way, we can try a whole lot of different combinations and end up getting quite a few,” Dustin said. “Whereas, if we brute force [phrases], we’ll get pretty much nothing.”
Now the pair is looking to start mining words from Twitter to add more casual verbiage to their lists.
Apparently every word and number that has been said is fair game, so the chances of you coming up with a good password ever again is zero (that is, if you use words and numbers in your passwords as opposed to random combinations of characters!).
Image via Thalita Carvalho, Hat tip to The Verge
