Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

At first I was really impressed by `1qaz2wsx3edc4rfv5tgb6yhn7ujm8ik,9ol.0p;/`, but then I watched my keyboard and all became clear. These brute force tools are getting better and better at trying useful combinations to the point where I think all "clever" are now known to the tools and the only thing that remains is completely random passwords as they are generated by password managers.

Thank you for posting this list - this is very enlightening.

View on HN

I once used shift + top number row as a password for windows.

I thought I was really clever until I changed keyboard layouts one day and had to use the browser on my phone to get a picture of the old keyboard (and its layout) to figure out what the actual password was.

Yep yep yep! A long time ago I had four or five different passwords based on QWERTY keyboard patterns and I had no idea what any of the passwords even were. I thought it was so cool!

Then I moved to a country that used predominately AZERTY keyboards and couldn't access any of my accounts...

This is known as a "keyboard walk" and its variations are one of the more common patterns tested for.

I wonder if Dvorak keyboard walks are also targeted?

I'm guessing not. Your comment is my first result in Google search for "keyboard walk" dvorak.

Edit: Ars Technica had a piece a while back on crackers and how they build their lists of probable passwords. I imagine if Dvorak-based passwords became common, they wouldn't last long as "secure" before appearing in those lists.

Edit: The Ars link follows. You'll notice that the password in the story title is a keyboard walk, which the writer confuses as being complex, when it is not: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi...

To add to the ease of hacking around it, how the hell are you supposed to log in from a phone? Or a different keyboard layout?

Password manager but then in that case it might as well be random.

That's a matter of memorizing when you encounter that situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com