halflife 2 goes gold
The head of Valve Software is named Gabe Newell. I didn't know that. Valve are the makers of the game Half Life. I knew that. When Gabe Newell had to pick a password for a popular HalfLife forum, he chose "gaben". I didn't know that. But apparently, someone guessed.
Pwned!
Did they learn nothing at all from the first incident ? In the case of Valve, it seems that far from securing entrances after their source code galloped away, they've actually taken a couple of HE grenades to the stable door ("door ? what door ? we don't need no steenkin' door")
In the interests of edjamacating anyone who isn't in the know, guessable passwords are bad. That means names, dates of birth, anything that can be found in a wordlist (or two) is bad bad news. Imagine someone sending an email in your name ? Even webmail accounts need something a bit better than throwaway passwords.
A couple of informative articles on password security can be found here, but beware, it's a quasi-blackhat site. By the way, Half-Life 2 is now released. And I fully expect the gods to be laughing (muahahaha etc) and directing someone to break into one of my accounts as I blog this.
Pwned!
Did they learn nothing at all from the first incident ? In the case of Valve, it seems that far from securing entrances after their source code galloped away, they've actually taken a couple of HE grenades to the stable door ("door ? what door ? we don't need no steenkin' door")
In the interests of edjamacating anyone who isn't in the know, guessable passwords are bad. That means names, dates of birth, anything that can be found in a wordlist (or two) is bad bad news. Imagine someone sending an email in your name ? Even webmail accounts need something a bit better than throwaway passwords.
A couple of informative articles on password security can be found here, but beware, it's a quasi-blackhat site. By the way, Half-Life 2 is now released. And I fully expect the gods to be laughing (muahahaha etc) and directing someone to break into one of my accounts as I blog this.
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