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The passwords say a lot about each site's userbase.

singles.org users commonly use passwords with religious meaning, like "jesus", "pastor", and so on. Apparently this is a site that appeals to the religious folks.

phpBB has things like "phpbb" and "password". Their forums force people to create an account they don't want, so they pick a dumb password. (I had to ask a phpbb question once. I think I used 1234 as my password.)

Finally, Myspace is Myspace, and has commonly-ocuring gems like "poop" and "nigger1". Ah, high school kids...



I just use the same username and password for all sites I don't care about that much. That way if I ever come back again I can just log in easily, and the process of signing up is so familiar I could do it in my sleep.

No, the real issue is password questions. "What is your mother's maiden name?" "In what city were you born?. Those always seem like a security hole, so I choose a random question and just remember that the answer to all my security questions is "the landed gentry". That's fairly secure, right?


Yeah, I especially like the sites that ask you to make your own security question. Mine is always, "what is your password?"


That's what my XP hint did, and my password contains an accented character (áéíóú/ÁÉÍÓÚ) as I noticed password breakers tend not to use these characters by default, but a lot of programs and services accept them. To say just hitting 'Alt Gr' can prevent any password breaker, I thought it was a pretty good safety measure.


I hope that's not actually the answer you use...


"On Feb 21 2009 it was discovered that singles.org, a christian dating network, did not have any security at all."

Some of the other ones are puzzling. "trustno1" is from the X-Files, but does anyone know where "letmein" came from?


let-me-in


I got that, but is there something that made that a popular password? It seems like too much of a coincidence that so many people use it.


I don't think it's a reference to anything, simply that you're saying to the computer "let me in!"


I'm not sure, but I think it was a movie or something.




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