It’s official: Malicious hackers have crappy password hygiene, too

9 years ago
10 June 2014
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Jasper_The_Rasper
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This article is a bit surprising to me. Although the hackers are only human you would think with them spending all their time hacking into businesses, Government systems etc they would be well aware of how vital a strong password is, but obviously not.

Analysis uncovers short, predictable words, plaintext storage.

by Dan Goodin - June 10 2014

"Given the amount of time malicious hackers spend bypassing other people's security, you might think that they pay close attention to locking down their own digital fortresses. It turns out that many of them don't, according to a recent blog post documenting some of their sloppiest password hygiene.

The post comes from Antonín Hýža, a researcher at antivirus provider Avast. As he was working to analyze a protected PHP shell, he got to wondering how strong the average hacker password was. He then tapped 40,000 samples of backdoors, bots, and shells his company had on hand. Remarkably, 1,255 of the underlying passwords were in plaintext, while another 346 were protected with the easily crackable MD5 hashing algorithm. The resulting 1,601 passwords he had to work with allowed him to see just how poor the bottom four percent of hackers' passwords were."

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