full-disclosure - Analysis of Myspace passwords

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Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:11:40 +0100
From: Jeremy Saintot <jeremy@...amiel.com>
To: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Analysis of Myspace passwords

   Here is a short analysis of the passwords chosen by myspace users,
that some guy has phished a few weeks ago.

   The analysis is based on a list of 36700 user passwords.  The
original file contained 56000+ lines, but I removed the blank passwords
and those that were 20+ characters length, which were in most cases any
kind of personal message from smart users to the phisher... ;)  Thus, I
can state a first affirmation: Over 34 % of people won't fall in
phisher's trap, which is not so bad.

   First, I chose a very standard password dictionary file found on the
internet, which contained about 2300 lines.  The file contained 408 (1,2
%) of the passwords picked by myspace users.

   It's very interesting to see peoples habits when it comes to choose a
password.

   About prefixes/suffixes
   -----------------------

- 8,3 % used a numeric prefix.
- 72,7 % used a numeric suffix.
- 54,5 % used a numeric suffix between 0 and 99 (1 and 2 digits)
- 7,8 % used a numeric suffix between 100 and 999 (3 digits)
- 6 % used a numeric suffix between 1000 and 9999 (4 digits)
- 16,6 % used the suffix "1"

   An amusing thing is that 3,3 % of people use the "!" suffix, and 1,5
% use ".".

   At this point, I wrote a little script that appended all 1 and
2-digit numbers to my 2300 lines dictionary file.  My dict file is now
~2MB, which remains reasonably small.  This new file contained 3410 (9,2
%) of the myspace passwords.

   Here is the top-50 numeric suffixes: 1, 2, 3, 123, 12, 7, 5, 6, 4,
13, 11, 8, 9, 69, 23, 22, 14, 07, 06, 21, 16, 15, 10, 01, 0, 17, 24, 18,
88, 09, 101, 89, 33, 1234, 08, 91, 77, 20, 92, 666, 19, 25, 99, 00, 90,
05, 55, 44, 420, 04.

   It's obvious that the most popular are the numbers beween 0 and 100.
  A frequent choice is a suffix between 1990 and 2007, due to the
average age of myspace users.  For other usage, this should be extended
from ~1950 to 2007.

   About passwords lengths
   -----------------------

- 24,3 % used a 8 characters length password
- 24   % ------ 7
- 18,4 % ------ 9
- 16,2 % ------ 6
- 15,2 % ------ 10
- 3,2  % ------ 11

   Other interesting stats
   -----------------------

- 6,4 % used a loweralpha only password
- 83,3 % used a loweralpha-numeric password
- 10,9 % used one or more special chars (not in a-z, A-Z, 0-9)

- 0,1 % of passwords contained the sequence 'myspace'
- 0,2 % of passwords contained the sequence 'password'

   I hope this information can be useful for anyone.

Regards,

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