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7 Tips To Toughen Passwords
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ComScience
ComScience,
 User Rank: Apprentice
6/9/2012 | 8:50:52 PM
re: 7 Tips To Toughen Passwords
"The best possible encryption" means a level of complexity, licensing and processing that is too expensive for most websites. You are probably thinking about military grade encryption?

Using MD5 is a standard encryption process, salted hashes should have been implemented and would have made the decryption much more difficult. See the wikipedia article for more information.

What the hackers did is convert the hashed password back into the text password using various processes including rainbow tables.

A simple explanation is if I make a password of "2Paramount109"and convert it to an MD5 hash, I get a 16 byte string of Hexadecimal characters that are the same no matter what MD5 conversion I use.

If I now have a list of MD5 hashes, I can see which ones match a table of pre-converted passwords. These huge tables of pre-converted passwords are called rainbow tables and can be generated using software at home, or purchased online.

They didn't actually try different login / password combinations on the live website, which could have locked them out of the website.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

NanosecPeterS
NanosecPeterS,
 User Rank: Apprentice
6/9/2012 | 6:59:54 PM
re: 7 Tips To Toughen Passwords
Maybe I am stupid, but I don't understand the logic what the author is talking about.
If the website ( they all should ) have a lock on the account after three unsuccessful password entry, so it doesn't matter how fast they can crack passwords. If the web-site doesn't have such a protection I simply don't want to enter any sensitive information there, that is all .
If the recovered password from the compromised web-site was not encrypted with the best possible encryption - that is not the user fault and the strength of the user password doesn't have anything to do with it.
Osmore
Osmore,
 User Rank: Apprentice
6/9/2012 | 5:39:23 PM
re: 7 Tips To Toughen Passwords
Some of you well-meaning authors need to recognize the real impracticality of your preachings. Some of us have well over 100 sites that we visit which require passwords, including this one. To do as you suggest is simply not practical. Why can't you come up with more meaningful ideas and get out of your ivory towers?
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