Were actually silly enough to put “password” as their password! Almost all of the passwords used were under 8 characters long. Simple keyboard combinations like “qwerty”, “123456” and “abcdefg” were common enough to upset me. It’s not just about snooping either I found that most of you use really poor passwords. It’s also quite apparent that no one really cares that hacking someone else’s email account is illegal - fines, jail terms, that kind of illegal. We even got a few dozen women looking for passwords of male friends, so apparently stalking isn’t gender-specific. The very first trend that emerged, was that most of the respondents were male, and looking for passwords of females - so basically, a bunch of voyeurs, or stalkers. Since I had to put your passwords to some good use, I decided to do a little data mining. Although I’m not voyeuristic (and am not going to access your mail), all those of you who have sent me your passwords, are certainly quite the opposite. So here I am, sitting with over 1000 passwords, and potential access to a lot of your personal information. As of last count, over 1,100 people had happily parted with their own password, to try and get into someone else’s account - with the number increasing on a daily basis, this is hardly a failed experiment. It was in Digit, and our readers are supposed to be “tech gurus”. The entire magazine was centered around “Security”. The article it appeared in was about “social engineering”. The title of the box seemed descriptive enough. There are several reasons why this experiment should have failed: 1. We added in a little box on page 45 called “A forward you should ignore”, which basically told you that there was a way that you could get Gmail passwords of other people. FOR OUR SECURITY special last month, we decided to conduct a little social experiment.
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