"Happiness" is a Smoking Gun.

by Jimmy Marks

We all know about Ron's article earlier in the week about the Twitter break in. And we all know the implications of an easy-to-guess password. But just what WAS that password? 

"happiness". 

The hacker himself offered INTERVIEWS about his hacking acumen over an instant messenger interview. To quote the article from All Things Digital (a division of WSJ online - click here): 

"The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account." 

And that's all it took to put Twitter in a twist. 

Happiness, by the way, is nine lower-case letters long. According to the password strength analyzer from Mandylion Research Labs (you can download it for yourself - click here), the password would take six days or less to guess with one "guesser" in play. That decreases dramatically when ten guessers are used (from six days to fifteen hours). 

So...how secure is your password? 

Comments

[coffee buzz]

did the Twitter Admin change his password to "sadness" after he was hacked? haha... ok not funny