People's passwords

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Seems like the gurus are just as bad as us mere mortals when it comes to password security. From BoingBoing:

Computer historians crack passwords of Unix's early pioneers
Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman.

Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and posted about it on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, revealing that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac", Bourne's was "bourne", Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl", and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,".

Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Özalp Babaoğlu's was "12ucdort", Howard Katseff's was "graduat;", Tom London's was "..pnn521", Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move).

Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie were the people who codified the C Programming Language which was what Unix was written in and became the default programming language for all other operating systems and computers.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 10, 2019 9:19 PM.

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