Posts Tagged ‘password’

Popular Malaysian passwords (sample size=75,000)

I just read that about 100,000 most likely Malaysian Facebook accounts have been cracked. Well their passwords are available for all to see in pastebin. Upon checking, I only saw a little over 75,000 since the third file has been compromised. From that sample, I quickly derived that the most popular Malaysian passwords are:

  1. 123456
  2. sayang
  3. brokenheart
  4. 123456789
  5. rozaliqa75
  6. effaluve
  7. akucintaallah
  8. zzz999
  9. pradeebkumar123$%
  10. 12345678

The least popular ones in that sample set include having spaces, hashes, brackets, and more. So there are some secure ones!

Using one’s phone number seems to also be popular. Sometimes appending or pre-pending a string (like a name) to it. Using birthdays seems to also be quite common, sometimes also appending or pre-pending a string like a name to it.

And for those wanting to “further analyse” the dataset yourself, I just quickly used standard Unix tools, and you can do it too.

grep "Password:" part_* | awk -F":" '{print $3}'| sort | uniq -c |sort -n

Pipe to less, use head/tail, etc.

Forced password changes

My employer has this odd policy where they force you to change your password, once every six months or so. Its annoying, because sometimes, you forget your password. Its inherently more insecure to write it down somewhere, isn’t it? Plus, you can’t reuse passwords.

However, my mail client always has my password. And therein comes, a useful Thunderbird add-on, called Password Exporter.

Now, I can see what my last known password was, and login when need be.


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