On Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:48:50 -0600 Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On a security related question. Why does so many people have their > facebook accounts and other similar sites hacked? Do hackers just > guess their passwords or do they break into the websites? I have > facebook, myspace, google+ and a couple others and have had them for > years. I have never had mine hacked into, at least not yet. I'm > just curious. Is it a windoze thing? lol Nothing like that. Most people think they are very clever about passwords but they are actually rather dumb about it. Easiest way to break into many people's FaceBook page is to scrape their FaceBook page and throw a lexical analyser at it (that being the same class of software that search engines use - it looks for patterns in text. The software does not have the human bias we all have, so it can find relations that our minds are wired to ignore). The more public the person's FaceBook page is and the more activity it has on it, the greater the odds that they will leak enough information about themselves so that software can make a reasonable prediction about what sort of passwords they use. When you approach this problem with an understanding of human psychology you almost always find that the range of possible passwords for people is far far smaller than we think. I'll even tell you who are the WORST offenders: Geeks. Geeks are their own worst enemies, and their accounts are very valuable targets to crackers. Geeks are a niche class of humans and are prone to think the same way (not all the time of course, they just share much more in common with each other than the big group called humanity). Too many geeks think they are being cute with their clever password schemes. Here's a common one: something from Lord of The Rings translated to l337-speak <sigh>. And the geek who does it is blind to the fact that he's doing it - simple observer bias about self. That's not true for all geeks of course - some really do have well-nigh uncrackable passwords. But I find that when a geek is a victim of his own bias and does something dumbish, it's usually a spectacular level of dumbishness. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
