As we’ve established time and again, your clever tricks aren’t protecting your password. If you or someone you know uses Bible references as a password, that trick is pretty easy to crack, too.
Basing a password on a Bible verse—like using john316 or psalm23, for example—is a popular way to create a memorable password. An analysis of the 2009 Rockyou hack that revealed 32 million usernames and passwords found that various Bible verses accounted for a large number of passwords. As news site Boing Boing points out, these may be easy to memorize, but they’re also fairly easy to crack. Even if you’re not using a popular verse as your password, using the Bible as a template still gives hackers a way to guess what you’re doing:
An article in Christianity Today advises against using your “life verse” as a password, but fails to warn that other ways of turning verses into passwords — like using the first letter of each word in a verse — are also fairly weak, in that it is easy for computers to compile a database of all easily memorable passwords that could be constructed in this way.
If you study the Bible regularly, using verses or basing your password on a passage is tempting because you’re already memorizing the text. However, remember that hackers can always figure out the patterns you’re using and they have a lot more collective time to devote to it. Instead, stick with using a password manager and passwords that hackers can’t guess instead.
Bible references make very weak passwords | Boing Boing
Photo by Phillip Taylor.