troyhunt - Slashdot User

Submission + - Browsing the broken web: a software developer behind the Great Firewall of China (troyhunt.com)

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troyhunt

on Thursday March 15, 2012 @11:10PM

troyhunt writes: "Whilst we’ve long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It’s an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can’t work in the country with the world’s largest internet population."

Submission + - The science of password selection (troyhunt.com)

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troyhunt

on Monday July 18, 2011 @04:24AM

troyhunt writes: "We all know by now that most people do a pretty poor job of choosing passwords, but what’s behind the selection process? What’s the inspiration for choosing those short, simple passwords that so often adhere to such predictable patterns? It turns out there’s a handful of classic routes that people follow to consistently arrive at the same poor choices – and some of them are pretty shocking."

Submission + - A brief Sony password analysis (troyhunt.com)

Submitted by

troyhunt

on Monday June 06, 2011 @05:07AM

troyhunt writes: "So the Sony saga continues. As if the whole thing about 77 million breached PlayStation Network accounts wasn’t bad enough, numerous other security breaches in other Sony services have followed in the ensuing weeks, most recently with SonyPictures.com where a significant portion of the database was publicly disclosed a few days back.

With all this customer data now unfortunately out there for public viewing, I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on password practices. There are some rather alarming (although not entirely surprising) findings including:

36% of passwords appear in a common password dictionary.
50% of passwords are 7 characters or less.
67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password.
82% of passwords are lowercase alphanumeric of 9 characters or less.
99% of passwords don’t contain a single non-alphanumeric character."

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