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The Bible is telling people your passwords

The Bible is telling people your passwords

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The Bible is giving your passwords away, according to an Ars Technica report on the future of password cracking. The site spoke to password security researcher Kevin Young, who describes how he and fellow researcher John Dustin fed the book — among 15,000 cribbed from free online repository Project Gutenberg — into their cracking software. The software started to utilize words and phrases found in literature and on websites, and was first used on 344,000 passwords leaked from intelligence firm Stratfor in 2011. Ars Technica says both watched as "a flood of once-stubborn passwords revealed themselves."

Ars Technica goes on to explain how Young and Dustin — along with other researchers — used the method with later leaks, how they came to trawl Twitter to add "hooah" to their cracker's lexicon, and how your passphrases might not be as safe as you've been told.