Benjamin Pomfret

Cyber Security

       Research conducted by security experts in the UK and China shows, for the first time, that an overwhelming number of passwords for online accounts, used for anything from banking, social media, and shopping are vulnerable to targeted online guessing. Targetted online guessing targets a single, specific at one time and exploits known information about them. This type of hack is successful because many people use the same password(s) for everything. Also, because these passwords are so predictable large system hacks are very successful as long as the correct people are targeted.

Researchers from Lancaster University,  Peking University  and, Fujian Normal University, used different frameworks generated in-house to take a single of a few pieces of information to guess passwords. These frameworks are fully autonomous and so they are very prevalent. The frameworks success was "73 per cent of normal users, and around a third of security-savvy users with a limit of 100 guesses. In the US, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) guidelines for internet services require password attempts to be limited to 100 within a 30 day period."

       Large server rooms are used to do mass calculations to approximate the success of the hack. Many of the researchers found that the success of the framework relied heavily on how computer savvy the user was assumed to be based on demographics.

---

Story Source:

Materials provided by Lancaster University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.