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Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

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Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#4
post #2

DataGenetics did a similar analysis with four-digit numbers in leaked passwords and PINs. The article contains lots of cool visualizations. http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/

DataGenetics have really cool and interesting articles. I've been following them for a couple of years now...been asking for a "Bin and Order Packin" post.

Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#5
post #3

Looks like a few of the patterns in his analysis has a tendency towards Benford's Law[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Technically it describes none of these. Benford's Law only describes collections of leading digits. The charts in the article are just exponential distributions.

Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#6
post #3

Looks like a few of the patterns in his analysis has a tendency towards Benford's Law[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

The article says:

> Distributions that would not be expected to obey Benford's Law:

> ...

> Where numbers are influenced by human thought: e.g. prices set by psychological thresholds

Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#8
Huh. Of all my old blog posts, this is the last one I expected to randomly resurface at the top of Hacker News.

There were a lot of other articles made using this 10M Password dataset at the time it was originally released, which the dataset author aggregated into a subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/10millionpasswords/). WPEngine, for example, has a much more comprehensive writeup with ad-hoc looks at specific passwords (http://wpengine.com/unmasked/).

Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#9
post #2

DataGenetics did a similar analysis with four-digit numbers in leaked passwords and PINs. The article contains lots of cool visualizations. http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/

I'm always struck by the uncredited similarities of stuff there to other sources, like the pin grid, found in this paper published earlier in 2012 than the blag there:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/BPA12-FC-banking_pin_...

Re: Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)

#10
I'm surprised 69 is third instead of first. I'm even more surprised the author is surprised it's in the tops.

When I first looked at a password database I actually laughed out loud at how many 69 there were. I don't know, there is something funny about 'Yaris69' or 'Puppy69', although it's probably used ironically these days.

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