Bad grammar has never been encouraged, although it is very often encountered. It is a common belief in a few parts of the world, that people who are not familiar with the key grammar rules will not succeed in life. Well, thankfully that applies only in a handful of countries where foreign languages are not really popular yet. However, things are completely different online.
A new study made by the Carnegie Mellon University, discovered that the more grammar mistakes you make, the less likely is someone to hack your password.
The most popular way used for password cracking is the so-called brute force method. It uses words and phrases enlisted in dictionaries, as well as algorithms and programs like Hashcat and John the Ripper. When these programs try to hack a password, they enter various words. The more sophisticated and powerful the computer is, the faster the password will be cracked. Some can even enter over 30 billion password suggestion in less than a second. But despite these impressive tech abilities programs and algorithms are not able to hack passwords which are grammatically incorrect.
The study included 1434 passwords of no less than 16 characters. What researchers discovered was that nearly 1/5 of the Internet users consciously pick passwords that are made up of grammatical structures. All of them have a sequence of at least two dictionary words.
Scientists discovered that other common passwords contain kids’ or partners’ names, birthdays and anniversaries. Others prefer keyboard combinations that are not hard to remember or type like “1234” and “qwerty”. Surprisingly, researchers found that some users are too lazy to come up with a password and they simply type in “password”.
The study debunks the popular misconception that longer passwords are stronger. According to the researchers, the structure of the passphrase is more important than its length. They have conducted an experiment in which they have tried to crack long passwords. The result was that about 10% of them were a piece of cake to break. The reason – they were grammatically correct!
The people behind the study think that even postal, email and web addresses are not secure enough to be used as passwords.
It’s time for some grammar crimes!
