What you’re looking at there is a list of the 32 most common passwords from among the set of more than 32 million users of RockYou. The top item, ‘123456’ was used by more than 300,000 users. We don’t normally get to look at actual user data in sets this large, but one benefit of the recent privacy breach at… Read more →
Tag: security
You can see it everywhere you look: people just ain’t no good
Hmm… A study by the Ponemon Institute found that more than 59 percent of those surveyed kept corporate data after leaving their jobs. The survey, which was sponsored by Symantec, included responses from 945 adult employees who had lost or left a job in 2008. The most commonly stolen pieces of information were e-mail lists and non-financial business information, taken… Read more →
Aside
Remember when Microsoft had the genius idea of embedding code inside documents–remember how that worked out from a security perspective? Remember when browsers started allowing executable code to be embedded in the pages–there was no security problem with that, right? So clearly the best thing for us to do is to add a new way to embed natively executable code in web pages. There’s no way that could go wrong, right?
SF Writers Say Smart Things: Cory Doctorow on statistics and security
I often use the same example Cory uses here in discussing security issues at work: 99% effective means 10,000 failures over a million instances. Which in turn means that if you’re trying to detect a 1-in-a-million event, then you will get it 9999 false positives for every real event you detect–and at that rate, you will never find the actual… Read more →
“Long Weekend” Bag of Links
I put it in scare quotes because I am a member of the global information economy, and apparently what that means is that I have to take some meetings on those holidays that are merely national in scope. Yes, I am a grumpy about this. Well, honestly I’m mostly grumpy about having to be up in time for an 8AM… Read more →
Monday Miscellany
It’s really a miscellany today. I was half-tempted to title this 88 lines about 44 links, and maybe even do it in some kind of poetic structure, but fortunately a combination of laziness and good sense prevailed. Nice to see that former local (and HGPA-member) Brian O’Malley‘s movie deal is actually happening–at least leads are being cast and a start… Read more →
