How I became a password cracker | Ars Technica
Jared Sperli stashed this in security
Stashed in: Hackers!
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It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and the resources of the Internet, successfully:
- Find a set of passwords to crack
- Find a password cracker
- Find a set of high-quality wordlists and
- Get them all running on commodity laptop hardware in order to
- Successfully crack at least one password
- In less than a day of work?
I could. And I walked away from the experiment with a visceral sense of password fragility. Watching your own password fall in less than a second is the sort of online security lesson everyone should learn at least once—and it provides a free education in how to build a better password.
12:26 PM Mar 26 2013