4 ms·
Countries that speak English and use English keyboards are going to show up as weaker in this kind of analysis, because the "top 50 passwords" heavily features
by dmurray 10y ago
Countries that speak English and use English keyboards are going to show up as weaker in this kind of analysis, because the "top 50 passwords" heavily features the likes of "football" and "qwerty". I'm not sure what "top 100 password patterns" could mean.
These users (USA, then to a lesser extent India and Pakistan) really do choose objectively weaker passwords, because those passwords will be tried first by most automated password crackers. But it's not correct to conclude from that that the users have worse security practices. A better test for that would be to check against the most common passwords within each nation's corpus.
- Faizann20 10y agoSure thing. I would do that as well.
- vbezhenar 10y agoYou are right. Common strategy for Russian user is to get some simple Russian word and type it with english layout, so word "Москва" would turn into "Vjcrdf" which looks like rubbish, but is easy to crack if attacker is aware about this strategy.
- shagie 10y agoWhile the "top N" password lists are likely english centric, the other parts of the analysis aren't. Things like "length of password" or "percentage of users using their name/email in their password" is not something that is language dependent. That said, the wording of some of the passages appears to be one of "India is better than China at passwords." As the author appears to be Indian ("1.5 lac") there could be a hint of nationalism in this.
- mamon 10y agoLength of password is partially dependent on language (e.g German words tend to be longer on average). Also, many languages have their own diacritic characters (å, ä, ö, etc.), which, when used in password, will be counted as "special characters" (because they do not match standard [a-zA-Z0-9] regexp). So yes, password safety is at least partially influenced by user's language.