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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Wow, some of those passwords are unbelievably shocking. Is this a real leak? By the looks of it, those passwords weren't brute forced they were stored in plaintext... The complexity of some of these passwords is pretty high and some not so high, "Diego@ic.fbi.gov - opjwpoejt9U)(hfodkl"

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I was positively surprised by the amount of good passwords in that list. If you look at any other leak incident the amount of 'simple' and non-randomly generated passwords is much much higher.

In fact I think that is a testament to that this is actually a list from the FBI.

BTW everyone immediately assumes that these passwords were stored in plain text, but that does not have to be the case at all, this leak nowhere states that these passwords are from a database.

If a host gets hacked, there are plenty ways to obtain passwords without looking into a database.

I really wonder if the user would remember this password, or just copy paste it from somewhere. ;)

Usually, password managing software are used for creating and entering such passwords.

The classic trick with such nonsensical passwords is to use a phrase as mnemonic. "I replied to Garbage on Hacker News on the ninth of January" becomes "IrtGoHNotnoJ".

Looks more like banging on a keyboard to me. Perhaps this user just lets his browser store it and has it emailed to him if he forgets it.

I have passwords longer than that that I've memorized the hard way.

it isn't so hard to understand if the said person uses a password manager program like LassPass or 1Password.

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