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Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

themarkup.org

11–20 of 138 posts

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, all I can see is ••••••••••••. The browser builds in technology so that it conveniently shows you your password (BingoBingo77), but all I can see is ••••••••••••. Neat, right?

Phew!

Thanks for the smile, strangers.

For anyone out of the loop: http://www.bash.org/?244321

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#12

> Another legitimate case for password cracking is if someone in accounting encrypted a spreadsheet and then got hit by a bus and other employees needed access to that document Ah the good ol' bus factor.

I love that Nation States uses the "Bus Surprisal Index" as the measure of unexpected death rate.

https://nationstates.fandom.com/wiki/World_Census

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#14

Some rules of thumb: All Windows passwords shorter than about 10 characters shouldn't be considered secure, as the NT Hash at this point is so easily reversible that it's basically a "light obfuscation" at best. A single GPU can crack all 8-character passwords in minutes. The single best security setting on a Windows network is to increase the minimum password length to something like 14 characters. Use 20+ for privi…

Is this still true now that LM hash v1 support has been dropped?

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#16

meh. pro hackers do not crack or bruteforce passwords except as a last resort. they instead find some critical vulnerability that bypasses the need for passwords, or steal the browser sesion, or use malware. this is how so many people got crypto stolen despite strong passwords.

This is the point of TFA.

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#17
Hey, I keep seeing people claim biometrics somehow fix the password problem, but I feel like this is just a password you can't change? I can't change my fingerprints nor my retina, but if that data ever gets leaked, then that's vulnerable forever?

In my mind, there's no world where one could make a biometric scanner that couldn't be spoofed (presumably with an arduino USB interface) and then when all these corporations with the worst security (Facebook, Experian, etc) leak my data, can't anyone log into my account?

Re: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

#18
> Instead of passwords, we should use something like FIDO, which allows users to log in using a security key or biometric information.

The problem "in the real world" is that people will lose these keys all the time. I mean, I agree, passwords need to die, and hopefully some of the work that is being done by Apple and others will help bring on an end to passwords, but you can't really talk about replacing passwords with FIDO keys without talking about how to deal with account lockouts, which is a real, hard problem.

Similarly, biometrics may be good for a user ID but they make horrible passwords. These days fingerprints and irises can be copied from photographs.

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