
The longer passwords in the Last.fm database - ProfDreamer
https://www.leakedsource.com/i/lastfmlong.txt
======
pilif
At first I was really impressed by `1qaz2wsx3edc4rfv5tgb6yhn7ujm8ik,9ol.0p;/`,
but then I watched my keyboard and all became clear. These brute force tools
are getting better and better at trying useful combinations to the point where
I think all "clever" are now known to the tools and the only thing that
remains is completely random passwords as they are generated by password
managers.

Thank you for posting this list - this is very enlightening.

~~~
stargazer-3
To add to the ease of hacking around it, how the hell are you supposed to log
in from a phone? Or a different keyboard layout?

~~~
johnward
Password manager but then in that case it might as well be random.

------
kalleboo
Had a good laugh at this one

    
    
         <script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

~~~
facorreia
It look like someone fishing for a vulnerability instead of a real password.

~~~
chocolatebunny
Why not both? I mean Robert');DROP TABLE students;--1 seems like a pretty good
password.

------
jffry
See previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409530)

Notably, the passwords were stored as unsalted MD5 hashes, which even in 2012
was known to be a poor idea.

~~~
Houshalter
This is a stupid question but how is it possible to reverse such long
passwords from even a poor hashing algorithm? Even if the hashing algorithm is
super fast, testing all combinations up to dozens of characters should still
be impossible. And isn't there the possibility of collisions, so that even if
you find a string that maps to the same hash, it might not be the original
password?

~~~
Pikago
They were obviously testing for combinations of words and not combinations of
single characters. They might even have tested plain sentences. Still very
impressive. After all, the leak dates back to 2012. I wonder how much time did
the first one take for example.

I think strings that maps to the same hash are just inintelligible garbage. If
you find something that looks like human then it's certainly the original
password.

~~~
kijin
The first one is the title of a song [1]. The attackers probably have a lot of
common phrases, song titles, and other catchy excerpts in their dictionary.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I915tOiR9sM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I915tOiR9sM)

If it weren't a song title, it would probably have been impossible to crack.
That sentence has 12 words. People say that most English conversations only
use 3000 words. 3000^12 is 2^138. It has quite a bit more entropy than what we
can crack nowadays. Besides, "stripper" isn't part of the 3000-word
dictionary.

~~~
nzp
Those 3000 words are not random in natural language. If they were your
calculation would be correct, but they aren't so the actual entropy of the
system is likely nowhere near 138 bits. In other words, song title or not, if
the sentence was an actual sentence the entropy is _much_ lower. To get
maximum entropy out of sets of words you have to use something equivalent to
Diceware.

------
elaus
Interestingly, many of the longest passwords follow the same principle: A
sentence repeated three times with two scrambled letters in one word each.

~~~
INTPenis
Sentences usually have whitespaces between words though, makes the passwords
much easier to remember and handle.

I'm assuming last.fm does not support blanks in their passwords since none of
these passwords use that character. Or perhaps very few people realize you can
use that character to help make passwords more manageable.

My recommendation to people who ask the past few years has been full,
grammatically correct sentences.

~~~
Jugurtha
The problem is that the vast majority of websites I've seen handle the whole
process involving passwords horribly (registration, resetting, etc), which
induces users to use bad passwords just to get it over with.

Some let you fill out the form and then click on submit and tell you a problem
with your password or something. You change it, then they tell you it has to
be shorter than 15 or 10 characters, and impose such conditions you almost
wait for them to tell you "use: 2Hx,!rJ" as your password. Some don't even
support "special" characters, spaces, or hyphens. By the 4th or 5th attempt to
register, you're basically trying to come up with the stupidest password you
can to feed this monstrosity.

Mind you, somme of these are big companies websites. I think password or
registration management also affects things like talent acquisition. Companies
using Taleo for instance are doing a great job of repulsing normal, mentally
sane, people. The whole approach of registering one account for each company
on a different company subdomain on the same domain (company1.taleo.net,
company2.taleo.net) and for each one fill out the profile all over again is
beyond the realm of my comprehension.

The browser asks you to save the password/username for the website, but it
does so for the domain, not the subdomains which all have different passwords.
I give up on a company if it's using Taleo. I'm not talented or competent, but
I'm sure really competent people wouldn't want to put up with this either and
it hurts recruiting.

~~~
ryandrake
>The browser asks you to save the password/username for the website, but it
does so for the domain, not the subdomains which all have different passwords.
I give up on a company if it's using Taleo. I'm not talented or competent, but
I'm sure really competent people wouldn't want to put up with this either and
it hurts recruiting.

This sounds like your browser's password manager's problem, namely assuming
that users will only have a single password per top-level domain.

------
venning
If I know that I'm going to try to compromise a system and access its
username/password lists, is there an advantage to creating a number of
accounts to which I know the password prior to the break-in?

Does this make it easier to break the other accounts once I have access to
them encrypted? As in, I know that the account with username X has an
unencrypted password Y, so now I have guideposts to tell if my cracking
attempts are pointing in the right direction, trying to get back to password Y
from the hashes. I imagine there would be something of an advantage to already
knowing, say, 10,000 plaintext-encrypted pairs in a big list.

If this is the case, should one be concerned in managing a system that sees a
dramatic uptick in new user registrations as a precursor to an attack?

~~~
snowwrestler
Only if you are not able to characterize the hashing scheme, or if you think
the app uses a static salt that you don't know. Then having a known plaintext
would help figure it out. But I think you would only need one, not a ton of
them.

It seems like if someone hacks a system so badly that they get the whole DB,
they can probably also figure out the hashing scheme while they are in there.

I doubt that a dramatic uptick in new user registrations is a useful precursor
signal.

------
aleem
Any ideas on how they manage to crack these? I can't grok how they would
achieve this via a dictionary attack, especially the likes of:

    
    
        MgihtyDutchmanMgihtyDutchmanMgihtyDutchman
        alapdanceissomuchbetterwhenthestripperiscrying
        <script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

~~~
ryan-c
Password cracking "dictionaries" can have phrases in them.

~~~
aleem
I get that but permuting over typos, letter casing, lengths and combination of
words would make the dataset huge.

Is there a massively collaborated rainbow table database that is constantly
growing? Are there other heuristics that come into play such as guessing the
password length or some such thing?

~~~
phpnode
Rainbow tables aren't really a thing any more, you can calculate a hash much
faster than you can download one

------
mnsc
I wonder how my password policy stands up?

I have a memorized "satisfy stupid password rules"-string made up of
lowercase, uppercase, digit, special character. Eg. pA5$word

Then i take use "service name" [space] above string [space] "4-5 word sentence
that first pops into my mind when i think about the service name"

So for netflix I would get:

netflix pA5$word the net is flickering

Serves me well and I have never entered the secret string in any password
manager, only the ending sentence. I can't autotype it though but since it's a
sentence it's remarkably easy to type correctly. It also surprises me how
often I remember the "first sentence that pops into my mind".

The only problem I have with this scheme right now is services that don't
allow something in this pattern (mostly no spaces) and forces me to deviate
which makes my blood boil.

~~~
anotheryou
Depends on what the threat is.

For a brute-force dictionary attack: the "netflix" part is worth as much as a
single random character, the length by the sentence will do you much good. The
special chars are good.

When a hack like this becomes public happens and someone tries to attack you
in specific: the "netflix pA5$word" becomes worthless, but the sentence saves
you.

You forgetting stuff: the sentence will break your neck

I guess a good master-password and a password save with random passwords is
better, but you are doing pretty good! Also you can use a single password on a
untrusted computer without fearing to compromise all other passwords too
(again, thanks to that sentence).

~~~
hollander
> His password: netflix pA5$word the net is flickering

I don't get it that you say that "netflix" in this password has no more worth
than a single character. How can the cracker know that this is "netflix" and
not "netfli " or "neTflix"?

Furthermore, it's not like the password reveals itself during the process.
Untill all characters are found, there should be no logic in the result, or am
I wrong?

~~~
anotheryou
I thought he uses the unchanged service name as a prefix. If I had the chance
bruteforce netflix accounts with a dictionary I'd definitely have "netflix" as
one of my dictionary words to it (and Netflix and netflix.com and Netflix.com
etc).

~~~
mnsc
I assume netflix is in the dictionary for all word based bruteforce attack.
It's just a prefix word in the scheme that is super easy to remember, it's in
the url. And an attacker can't know whether it's www.netflix.com,
www.netflix.se, Netflix, NETFLIX, in the beginning, in the end or any number
of variants that could be used consistently in the scheme. The main part is
that I can remember it as "service name lower case" "breaker string" "words".

------
Desustorm
Would be really interested to know how they cracked these passwords...

~~~
creshal
Brute forced them?

~~~
manmal
I really doubt that they brute-forced
alapdanceissomuchbetterwhenthestripperiscrying. I have no exact idea, but I
guess i would take 1000s or millions of years to bruteforce 1,22680068e65
combinations (taking only lowercase letters into account), if you don't have a
working quantum computer available.

UPDATE: I did some rudimentary math and think that top notch server farms
would take something like 1e35 to 1e42 years to bruteforce 26^47 combinations.

~~~
phpnode
It's not a random sequence of characters, there are only 12 words in there.
The cracker is trying words, not just random bytes and so the search space is
much smaller

~~~
creshal
It's not trying random words, it's not even trying random syntactically valid
English sentences, it's trying out _song titles_.

Which is a laughably tiny password space.

------
andylang_
Last.fm users are clearly big fans of Radiohead.

~~~
ahmetkun
_no surprises_ there, Radiohead were always most scrobbled artist when i used
the site actively. They probably still are.

------
TheAceOfHearts
Well, this was a great promo for the people that built this site. I just paid
$4 for a 24 hour pass to search view all the info of mine that's been leaked.
Well worth the price in my mind.

I'd love to scan my work's customer database for hits, in order to prompt
those customers to reset their passwords. But I think $1k/month is too
expensive for us. Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives?

In any case, it's a great service to provide. After one of the more recent
leaks I ended up receiving emails from Pandora and Uber, prompting me to reset
my password.

------
mickmock
I'd hate to be David Iceland right now....

------
jve
Not many special characters there. However still notes on what those tools try
1st: Some for keyboard walk, Some for xss thing, one dot at the end and
parantheses or underscores seems not to help that much.

Seems like today a password manager is a must.

------
fotcorn
Kind of counters the idea from this xkcd comic that longer passwords are
better, even when they just contain dictionary words:

[https://xkcd.com/936/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

~~~
bwindels
It is indeed no longer good advice, but not because of longer passwords not
being better:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/choosing_secu...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/choosing_secure_1.html)

> This is why the oft-cited XKCD scheme for generating passwords -- string
> together individual words like "correcthorsebatterystaple" \-- is no longer
> good advice. The password crackers are on to this trick.

~~~
michaelt
Hasn't it always been the assumption that password crackers know about the
trick?

If I choose 4 words from a dictionary of 50,000 words [1] that produces
50000^4 possible passphrases. That's equivalent to 62 bits of entropy, or a
10-character [a-zA-Z0-9] password. About 8 years to brute force on MD5 with 2x
AMD HD 6990. And obviously an extra word makes it take thousands of years.

It's not ideal, but it's better than a lot of password advice.

[1] cat /etc/dictionaries-common/words | grep -v "'s" | egrep -v 's$' | wc -l
gives me 51726

~~~
reacweb
all the 50,000 words will not be chosen with the same probability. I think we
are more like a random 8 characters [a-zA-Z0-9] password.

~~~
creshal
> all the 50,000 words will not be chosen with the same probability.

Why?

~~~
reacweb
red hammer effect.

~~~
creshal
How does that affect /dev/random?

~~~
snowwrestler
The XKCD comic skips lightly over this by simply stating that the words were
randomly chosen. But being truly random is actually hard for most people to do
off the tops of their heads.

I doubt many people are taking away from that comic that they should use
software to reliably randomly choose the words they memorize. Instead the
advice seems to usually get shrunk down to "choose 4 random words," i.e. out
of your own head. Most people don't carry 50,000 word dictionaries around in
their heads. More like a few thousand. That changes the math considerably.

------
asciihacker
A password is just not enough. 2FA is almost a necessity I would guess.

------
circa
I had a good chuckle at the first one.

alapdanceissomuchbetterwhenthestripperiscrying

~~~
ahmetkun
how about ilikedyoubeforeyouwerenakedontheinternet ?

~~~
asib
Also appears to be a song by From First to Last.

------
necessity
How does leakedsource work? Basically they got password dumps and are selling
this information to companies? Isn't this illegal somehow ?

------
tempodox
These passwords are just abysmal.

------
tom_v
ok, the first one is just priceless!

~~~
DanielShir
Laughed at that one myself. It's an old Bloodhound Gang song -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMGVMtnxXEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMGVMtnxXEw)

And there's the connection to last.fm :)

~~~
tom_v
That makes much more sense than this being just a random sentence!

