The common password approach is the one that could give him instant success if the user is really using one of those common passwords for his accounts. His next approach would be to brute force his way in by brute forcing the password on a website that has weak security. Those sites would not react if large amounts of password requests would come in in short time. Most sites however ban IPs at least temporary after several failed attempts, still no problem if you know how to use proxies to attack with different IPs.

But the brute force programs that he suggests are way outdated. Brutus ? wwwHack ? That’s last millennium. Current state of the art bruteforcers for basic authorization and form protected sites are C-Force or Sentry. The brute force approach has one disadvantage. If you do not know the username you have to try username and password combinations and there is no guarantee that you will discover the combination for the user that you want to hack. You could get login details for other users which are absolutely worthless to you. This means, bruteforcing is only an option if you know the username of the user.

There are actually two ways to bruteforce an account. The first would be to use pregenerated lists of usernames and passwords or try combinations to get into an account. The second to try every char combination possible. It should be noted that the second option could very well last several years or even centuries depending on the size of the selected password.

So, bruteforcing is not really an option and he is not explaining how he would get the username of the user in question except mentioning cookies. Cookies are stored on the targets machine which would mean that he needs either access to that machine or an exploit to get them while the user is online. Not very practicable.

So, what can users learn from his analysis ?

• Don’t overuse passwords, it’s more secure to use different passwords. If you only use one password someone who finds this one out gets access to everything else that is protected by that single password
• Don’t use passwords that are easy to guess or common. No names, no sport teams, relatives, pets, work related, hobbies , and so on
• Use numbers and special chars if possible to increase the security of the password. Remember that size matters.
• Write them down locally and put them in a safe or use a software that encrypts them. You could for instance use a True Crypt partition to store a textfile with your passwords in them
• Every password could be important to gain additional information about a user, never choose weak ones

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