Study: Computer Scientists Pick the Strongest Passwords
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If you’re a student or teacher in a computer science school of a big college, chances are good that you pick stronger passwords than your peers in the arts school. In turn, the arts students usually pick better passwords than those in the business school, according to research presented this week. The landmark study is among the first to analyze the plaintext passwords that a sizable population of users choose to safeguard high-value accounts. The researchers examined the passwords of 25,000 faculty, staff, and students at Carnegie Mellon University used to access grades, e-mail, financial transcripts, and other sensitive data. The researchers then analyzed how guessable the passwords would be during an offline attack, such as those done after hackers break into a website and steal its database of cryptographically hashed login credentials.
