431–440 of 665 posts
I'm shocked at how well the old hashing stood up; sure, it's totally crackable today, but a well-picked password still took 4+ days to crack on modern hardware, which is remarkable. (Granted, it doesn't sound like they did anything fancy like throwing a hundred cloud instances at it or something; I'm not saying you should use DES today:) )
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Just curious, did you get yelled at because you destroyed the only copy of their password memory aid? ;)
If they were keeping their only copy at an unrelated University thousands of miles away, they had more problems than I thought ;) I'm actually not sure anymore what the details of their return email was, as it was over 25 years ago. But it was basically, "We will report you to law enforcement if you contact us again."
Easy brute force in 1989 I got in big trouble for it because I messed up the server.
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I hope this site is not fishing for passwords ...
Its quite truthworthy. Its run by Troy Hunt (known security researcher) and : "When you search Pwned Passwords The Pwned Passwords feature searches previous data breaches for the presence of a user-provided password. The password is hashed client-side with the SHA-1 algorithm then only the first 5 characters of the hash are sent to HIBP per the Cloudflare k-anonymity implementation. HIBP never receives the original p…
I remember cracking the password from a Windows system in high school. There was a centralized login mechanism using Novell but everything was cached locally. So you could boot a Linux CD and copy the password file to a memory stick, and crack at home. I think I used lophtcrack? The head admin account for the entire school district (basically root) had the password “north”. It took like a fraction of a second to crac…
I was expelled from university for pulling off the exact same exploit with the "workstation only" feature in Novell. In my case, they put a computer in every dorm room, and every single one of them had a domain-wide administrator account cached in its SAM file. It was inevitable that a student would find it. It's been almost 15 years now but I believe the password was rac3c4r or something trivial like that. I ran Oph…
I don't understand this justification. The system owners can't know that to be true and have to proceed as if the systems are compromised. Would you still feel safe if a burglar broke into your house and left a note saying they didn't take anything?
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To be precise, in the case of a patterned password (i.e., dictionary word or something a human can recognize), it leaks all but about 2-3 bits, assuming the human can work out the most likely mistake as in your example, and we assume it's a simple error like a nearby key or simple character flip. If it's a random password, it may still leave 2-3 bits per character as it becomes much harder to know where the error is…
> e.g., if "j9^vl4JO" is wrong, what is the correct password? Shouldn't that remain utterly trivial to brute though? If we're assuming all the standard face keys+shifted, I think that's 94 characters. If it's fully unknown then search space is 94^8 or about 6E15, not good but if it's an adaptive hash sizable. But if it's only a one character error, wouldn't you just brute through each of the 8 one by one with only 94…
Seems plausible the correct password might be j(6vl4JO...
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I was expelled from university for pulling off the exact same exploit with the "workstation only" feature in Novell. In my case, they put a computer in every dorm room, and every single one of them had a domain-wide administrator account cached in its SAM file. It was inevitable that a student would find it. It's been almost 15 years now but I believe the password was rac3c4r or something trivial like that. I ran Oph…
>I never once used it for evil: never read anyone's email, never viewed anyone's private files, never poked around the academic file shares for test solutions, never tried to steal credit card numbers or social security numbers from the finance office's file share. I don't understand this justification. The system owners can't know that to be true and have to proceed as if the systems are compromised. Would you still…
Did anyone bother to ask Ken’s permission first before publishing his password on the public internet? Based on his reaction he clearly didn’t mind, but still!
In my opinion this was a pretty crappy thing to do. Password could contain personal and potentially embarrassing information, even if that wasn't the case here.