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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday May 17 2018, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the check-the-code-on-my-luggage dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

A study carried out at a college in the Philippines shows that students with better grades use bad passwords in the same proportion as students with bad ones.

The study's focused around a new rule added to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guideline for choosing secure passwords —added in its 2017 edition.

The NIST recommendation was that websites check if a user's supplied password was compromised before by verifying if the password is also listed in previous public breaches.

If the password is included in previous breaches, the website is to consider the password insecure because all of these exposed passwords have most likely been added to even the most basic password-guessing brute-forcing tools.

What researchers from the Asia Pacific College (APC) have done was to take their students' email addresses associated with school accounts and check and see if the students' passwords had been leaked in previous breaches, correlating the final results with their GPA (grade point average).

All data such as names and passwords were hashed to protect students' privacy and personal information. Researchers checked students' passwords against a massive list of over 320 million passwords exposed in previous breaches and collected by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt, maintainer of the Have I Been Pwned service.

The results showed similar percentages of students across the GPA spectrum that were using previously exposed passwords —considered weak passwords and a big no-no in NIST's eyes.

Percentages varied from 12.82% to 19.83%, which is an inconclusive result to show a clear differentiation between the password practices of "smarter" kids when compared to the rest.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smarter-people-don-t-have-better-passwords-study-finds/


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 18 2018, @03:04AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday May 18 2018, @03:04AM (#680986) Journal

    > IT almost certainly has full access to their accounts without needing the password

    Of course, but they should not have access to the passwords, only the salted hashes of the passwords. Mainly that's to prevent accidental exposure. If the password file escapes, perhaps via a backup being misplaced, it will be harder for crackers to do much with it. Obviously system admins could break security to pieces in any number of ways, for instance by modifying the login program to stealthily record the actual passwords elsewhere.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday May 18 2018, @03:17PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday May 18 2018, @03:17PM (#681184)

    Which was my point - nothing in the article implies they DO have such access - there's any number of ways an officially sanctioned research group could figure out how many students were using exposed passwords without them being stored anywhere IT has access. Heck, even your stealthy password logger running for a while, checking passwords against the exposed list and tallying "exposed" ones could do the job, without ever storing the student passwords anywhere.